For years, data security expanded outward from data centers to devices, from email to APIs, from network gateways to SaaS ecosystems. Yet the place where over 85% of work actually happens—the browser—remained overlooked. It quietly became the center of gravity for sensitive data, the primary place where employees collaborate, download, upload, copy, paste, screenshot, share…and make mistakes.

At the same time, the number of places where data can travel exploded. Thousands of SaaS apps, shadow IT tools and a tidal wave of GenAI apps have accelerated the complexity of the modern workspace to a point where traditional, network-centric approaches simply cannot keep up. Inline controls alone miss too much. And relying on application signatures, URL categories and predefined libraries creates visibility gaps that attackers,and even regular employees, can walk right through.

The browser has become the “last mile” of data security. And with Prisma Browser, that last mile is no longer a blind spot.

The following are eight major data security challenges that finally meet their match when data security extends into the browser.

1. Encrypted Traffic Is the Largest Blind Spot in Data Security

The biggest challenge in modern security is also the one everyone quietly accepts: most traffic is encrypted, and traditional SWG-based DLP tools simply can’t see into most of it. In theory, decryption could solve the visibility problem, but in practice, it rarely does.

Technical limitations, performance penalties, user experience issues and business decisions often force organizations to bypass decryption entirely. Many companies won’t decrypt Microsoft traffic, for example, just to avoid slowing down Microsoft Teams or Microsoft 365. And even when you want to decrypt, modern applications push back. Certificate-pinned apps block man-in-the-middle decryption, and QUIC, the transport protocol behind HTTP/3, makes inline inspection even harder.

The result is a dangerous reality: sensitive data flowing inside encrypted channels, completely unnoticed and unprotected. At the end of the day, you can’t protect what you can’t see. However, 64% of traffic remains encrypted, and that number is only increasing.

Prisma Browser eliminates that blind spot by operating directly at the browser layer, where traffic is already decrypted for the user. It provides visibility into 100% of web activity with no dependency on network decryption, no performance impact and no risk of breaking applications.

2. The Expansion of Data Channels Has Outpaced Traditional Security Controls

In the early days of SaaS, vendors could manually add app support. A new cloud app became popular, the vendor updated their library, and the policy engine adapted.

That world is gone.

SaaS now expands faster than any traditional catalog can track. New apps go viral overnight. Micro-SaaS services appear without notice. Sensitive business processes move into niche tools that security teams have never even heard of.

Inline defenses struggle because they depend on identifying the app first. If the system doesn’t recognize the app, it can’t protect the data moving through it.

A browser-based model flips this around: the browser already sees everything the user interacts with—every web app, every SaaS platform, every private app and every new tool the moment it's used. There’s no waiting for a vendor update. No blind spots. If a user is using it, the browser knows it, and data protections can apply instantly.

3. The Explosion of GenAI Apps Has Created Chaos for Data Security

GenAI amplified this problem dramatically. Employees now use thousands of new AI tools that accept any kind of data: source code, customer records, financial models, internal presentations and private emails.

Worse, GenAI creates a false sense of privacy. Employees feel like they're “just talking to a bot,” and forget that the data they paste or upload is actually going straight into someone else's model. If that model is compromised, the data it contains becomes part of the breach.

Traditional tools are too slow to keep up with the pace of new AI apps. And even if they do identify the app, they often can’t see what the user typed or uploaded until after the data is already gone.

In the browser, it’s different. Data security can see every keystroke before you hit “Enter.” It can scan a file before it uploads. It can stop a sensitive paragraph before it’s ever submitted. And it can coach the user in real time—at the exact moment the risky action occurs.

This is the difference between reacting to a data leak and preventing one before it happens.

4. An Unsolved Challenge: Distinguishing Personal Vs. Corporate SaaS Tenants

One of the most realistic threats today is accidental or malicious use of personal accounts, including a user forwarding a confidential proposal to their personal Gmail, a departing employee copying files to a personal OneDrive or someone pasting customer data into a personal Dropbox.

Leading security vendors can identify tenant instances for many but not all major apps. And not fast enough to keep up with new or niche tools.

A browser-based model sees this distinction in real time, for any app, even newly released ones. It can allow users to freely use personal apps while ensuring no sensitive corporate data crosses into them. This enables flexibility for employees while preventing personal-account-based data loss.

That's security that mirrors how people actually work.

5. Activity-Level Control: The Long-Promised Dream of DLP Finally Becomes Real

For decades, data security has tried to inspect “data in use” inside applications. But the limitations were massive. Traditional DLP could sometimes detect uploads or downloads in certain apps. API-integrated CASBs could see specific activities in a handful of platforms.

But not everything. Not every action. Not every workflow.

In the browser, activity-level visibility becomes universal. Copy/paste. Upload. Download. Share. Print. Screenshot. Screen share. Clipboard operations. Even the act of typing confidential text into a field becomes visible and controllable.

This contextual awareness also enables more advanced data protection strategies like allowing only protected file downloads from Salesforce, regardless of content, as a high-assurance baseline.

This is true last-mile data security, the moment when a human action determines whether data stays safe or escapes. And the browser is the only place where that is consistently possible across every app, not just the ones a vendor has prewired.

6. Granular, Context-Aware Responses Replace Crude Allow/Block Policies

Traditional DLP policy models were primarily binary: allow or block. That’s why enforcement caused so much friction. Blocking legitimate work kills productivity. Allowing everything risks exposure.

The browser enables adaptive, context-based responses and minimizes business friction.

A user can be allowed to edit a sensitive document but not download it. They can share it with internal teams but not external ones. They can print one file but not another. They can transfer a document between corporate apps but not into personal storage. Documents can be watermarked or encrypted on the fly, warnings can be displayed in real-time and so on.

It becomes true zero-trust data security when every action on sensitive data is evaluated, in context, in the moment, and every response is tailored to that specific action.

And users aren’t punished but guided. Real-time coaching appears instantly in the browser when a risky action is detected, correcting behavior and reducing repeat incidents.

7. Protecting the Browser Means Protecting All Browsers — Including Consumer Ones

A secure enterprise browser is powerful. But what stops a malicious employee from simply opening Chrome or Firefox to exfiltrate data?

This is where extension-based controls matter: extending protections to consumer browsers and ensuring that data remains protected even when employees switch to unmanaged browsers.

A comprehensive browser approach must include:

• Full protection inside the enterprise browser, where every sensitive action can be monitored and governed with full context.
• Visibility and enforcement across consumer browsers with extensions.
• Redirection into the secure browser for corporate apps accessed from a consumer browser. This includes conditional access controls for SAML-based applications enforced through the identity provider, ensuring users can only access sensitive corporate apps from the secure enterprise browser.
• Freedom for personal browsing when no sensitive data is involved, preserving privacy and user flexibility.

This multilayered design delivers the best of all worlds: personal privacy, workplace flexibility and robust corporate safeguards, all at the same time.

8. All of This Only Works If Data Classification Is Exceptionally Accurate

Every security outcome depends on one thing: accurate data classification. If a solution can’t reliably identify sensitive data, everything collapses—false positives disrupt work, false negatives expose the company, and incident responders drown in alerts.

Traditional DLP struggled here for years.

Browser-based controls only work when paired with best-in-class classification, including AI-augmented detection, deep ML models and precise contextual analysis.

This is where Precision AI-driven classification changes the game. Sensitive data is identified with extreme accuracy, across structured and unstructured formats and across every channel to not only prevent data loss, but also preserve user productivity.

The Browser Is Now Essential to a Comprehensive Data Security Strategy

No single channel offers complete protection. Organizations still need a single data security solution that spans endpoint controls, network visibility, SaaS APIs, email security, cloud data protection, GenAI and AI agent security.

But for the first time, the browser joins this channel ecosystem as a primary control point and not an afterthought.

It is where most work happens.
It is where most data loss attempts occur.
And it is where the most granular, context-rich decisions can be made.

A truly comprehensive data security program today must protect every channel with a unified policy framework and a single console—and now, it must protect the browser too.

Because once the last mile is secure, everything upstream becomes stronger.

Learn more about the latest advancements to Prisma Browser at Ignite: What’s Next.