Where your customers' data is exposed today

Most organisations can say, truthfully, that customer data is encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest. Far fewer can say what happens to it in between. Try a simple exercise: pick one sensitive field, such as a card number, IBAN or date of birth, and follow it from the moment a customer types it to the moment it is stored.

The usual plaintext trail

• The browser, where third-party scripts share the page with your form.
• The load balancer, CDN or firewall, where TLS ends and the request is readable.
• Internal services and message queues, which pass the payload between each other.
• Logs, traces and error reports, which often capture request bodies by default.
• Support and admin tools, built for convenience rather than minimum access.
• Backups, analytics exports and test copies, which outlive their purpose.

Every stop on that list is a system you are trusting with the data, and an attacker only needs one of them.

Why it happens

Nobody designs this deliberately. TLS protects the connection, not the data, so once the connection ends the data is simply there. Each new service, tool and integration adds another place it can be read.

A better question

Instead of asking "is it encrypted?", ask "what is the smallest set of systems that genuinely needs to read this?" For most sensitive fields the honest answer is one application, not the whole path in front of it and behind it.

Mapping the trail is the first step. Shrinking it is the second.