A guide for IT and security leaders navigating modern transformation initiatives
Every year, IT and security leaders are asked to do more with less — modernize infrastructure, stop cyber attacks, harness the power of AI, and keep the business running without skipping a beat.
Yet one foundational security measure consistently lags behind: data encryption. Not only encryption at rest or in transit, but also the encryption of data in use. This gap is where breaches happen, where compliance erodes, and where digital transformation initiatives quietly stall.
Paperclip SAFE changes that equation. Built on modern searchable symmetric encryption, SAFE enables organizations to work with fully encrypted data without ever exposing it in plaintext. The result is a security posture that supports every major initiative on your roadmap.
Recent research from a top analyst firm pinpoints the top IT and security spending priorities for organizations in 2026. Here is how SAFE directly aligns with many of these priorities:
1. Building Customized AI Agents to Automate Business Processes
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how organizations operate. From intelligent document processing to autonomous decision-support agents, AI promises to unlock dramatic efficiency gains across every function. But there’s a problem few vendors want to talk about: your most valuable data is locked behind legacy encryption, and to use it, you have to expose it.
Traditional encryption forces a binary choice: keep data secure or make it usable. When AI agents need to query sensitive customer records, financial data, or proprietary business logic, that data must be decrypted first. Every decryption event is an opportunity for exposure, exfiltration, or abuse.
SAFE breaks this trade-off entirely. With SAFE, AI agents can query, analyze, and act on fully encrypted data — without ever seeing the underlying values. Your automation workflows get access to your most sensitive and valuable datasets, while that data remains protected end to end.
The business impact is significant: organizations can accelerate AI-driven automation without creating new attack surfaces, satisfy privacy regulations that restrict unencrypted data processing, and build AI systems that work on the full richness of enterprise data rather than sanitized, redacted subsets.
SAFE doesn’t just enable AI, it helps unlock the AI initiatives that legacy encryption technology was holding back.
2. Enhancing Cyber-Recovery and Resiliency
Ransomware, data extortion, and destructive cyberattacks are no longer a possible scenarios, but routine business risks. The question for most organizations is no longer if they will face a serious incident, but how bad the blast radius will be when they do.
Recovery from a major breach is measured in weeks and months, not days. The financial, reputational, and operational costs can be monumental. And increasingly threat actors aren’t just encrypting your data for ransom; they’re stealing it first and threatening public release unless demands are met.
SAFE assures that critical data is always encrypted, even while in use. This fundamentally changes what an attacker can achieve. If they breach your environment, they encounter data that is already encrypted — and that encryption is yours, not theirs.
Consider the alternative: if you don’t encrypt your sensitive data, a threat actor will. The difference is that their encryption is designed to harm you, while yours is designed to protect you. SAFE ensures you win that race decisively.
From a resiliency perspective, SAFE dramatically reduces the blast radius of any incident. Compromised systems yield ciphertext, not cleartext. Exfiltrated data is worthless without keys that never leave your control. Recovery becomes a containment and remediation exercise rather than a catastrophic data loss event.
For organizations building or maturing their cyber-recovery programs, SAFE is the technical foundation that makes resilience measurable, and defensible to the board.
3. Migrating Applications from On-Premises to Cloud (IaaS or SaaS)
Cloud migration represents one of the largest infrastructure investments organizations make in any given decade. Moving workloads from on-premises to IaaS or SaaS platforms opens the door to scalability, agility, and cost optimization, but it also introduces a fundamentally different threat model.
In an on-premises environment, the physical security perimeter provided a layer of implicit trust. In the cloud, your data resides in infrastructure you don’t own, runs on hardware shared with other tenants, and is managed by providers whose security practices you can audit but not control. The shared-responsibility model places a clear obligation on you to protect the data itself, not just the network perimeter around it.
Cloud migration is the perfect moment to modernize your encryption strategy. SAFE is the modern approach to database encryption — designed from the ground up for cloud-native architectures, where data must remain protected even from privileged insiders, cloud administrators, and compromised environments.
Legacy encryption solutions were designed for a world where the database lived in your data center. They weren’t built to protect data from the cloud provider itself, from over-privileged service accounts, or from sophisticated supply chain attacks that target cloud management planes.
With SAFE, you bring your encryption posture into the cloud era. Data remains encrypted in the cloud database, during query execution, and through every layer of the application stack. Migration becomes not just a lift-and-shift, but a genuine security modernization — one that you can document, audit, and certify for compliance purposes.
Organizations that migrate with SAFE arrive in the cloud with a stronger security posture than they had on premises. That’s a competitive and compliance advantage that compounds over time.
The Common Thread: SAFE Turns Security Into an Enabler
What unites the priorities of AI automation, cyber-resiliency, and cloud migration is that each one demands access to sensitive data in new environments, new contexts, and at new scale. Legacy security approaches treat that access as a risk to be minimized, often by restricting it entirely.
SAFE takes a different view: the goal isn’t to lock data away, it’s to make encryption smart enough that data can be used freely without ever being exposed. Security becomes a feature of the data itself, not a gate around it.
For IT and security leaders navigating transformation at speed, SAFE may be the missing piece: the technology that lets you say yes to AI, yes to cloud, and yes to resilience, without compromising on protection.
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To learn more about how SAFE fits your organization’s specific priorities, contact us for a tailored briefing.