When will National Data Security Day be celebrated? August 7th of each calendar year.
What is National Data Security Day? National Data Security Day establishes an annual focus on data protection best practices, coordinates awareness campaigns across industries, creates a platform for sharing knowledge and innovations, and recognizes organizations leading in responsible data management. This day marks America’s commitment to treating data security as essential business infrastructure, similar to how we recognize National Small Business Day.
How should National Data Security Day be celebrated or observed? National Data Security Day serves as more than symbolic recognition. It marks America’s commitment to treating data security as essential business infrastructure. Just as we recognize National Small Business Day, we need recognition for the data security practices that enable business growth and innovation.
The day will be observed through three core celebration activities that promote data security awareness and best practices across American businesses:
- Nominate Data Security Heroes Organizations and individuals can honor the unsung heroes protecting our data by nominating outstanding professionals in five key categories:
- Defender of Data – protecting the free world, or even just their organization, against internal and external threats to data everywhere
- Compliance Champion of Data – ensuring data governance, risk and compliance meets critical standards
- Wizard of Data Management – performing magic to find and optimize data usage
- AI & LLM Data Protector – ensuring AI safely uses and shares only the data that is required
- Cloud Data Defender – using data to prioritize and protect cloud infrastructure
- Winners will be announced during the BlackHat conference on August 8, 2025, receiving recognition awards that ensure the world knows how they are protecting data for all of us.
- Share Data Security Stories – The cybersecurity community will share real-world experiences, both successes and lessons learned, to educate and inspire others. Whether it’s an amazing story of defending against an attacker, breezing through an audit, or valuable lessons that others can learn from, these stories build collective knowledge and resilience.
- Promote Data Security Awareness – Chief information security officers, data protection specialists, regulatory compliance teams, cloud engineers, privacy professionals, technology vendors, security researchers, business journalists, solution integrators, software providers and anyone else working in enterprise information management can mark Data Security Day by sharing insights on social platforms using the hashtags #DataSecurityDay2025 and #DataSecurityDay.
The day also serves as an opportunity for enterprises to acknowledge and honor their information security personnel, regulatory specialists and governance professionals by highlighting them on social platforms. Organizations are encouraged to conduct annual “Data Health Checks,” comprehensive audits of their data inventory, access controls and security posture, while promoting responsible data and AI practices.
Leadership teams can use this day to review and update their data governance policies and regulatory compliance frameworks. Ultimately, the day serves as both a moment of reflection on current practices and a catalyst for implementing improved data security measures in the year ahead.
In future years, technology companies will be encouraged to coordinate product launches, industry studies and corporate gatherings to coincide with Data Security Day, establishing a focused period for innovation demonstrations and expert guidance in the data security domain.
Why was National Data Security Day created? America needs a National Data Security Day to address an urgent gap in how we protect our digital economy and business infrastructure. We propose establishing this national recognition because data security has become essential to economic competitiveness and business continuity, yet we currently lack coordinated awareness and best practices to address rapidly evolving digital threats.
The business case is clear: according to the “2025 Enterprise Data Security Confidence Index,” a staggering 82% of cybersecurity professionals report critical gaps in finding and classifying organizational data, with 53% lacking real-time visibility into their sensitive assets. This visibility gap leaves organizations vulnerable to data breaches and compliance violations while hampering their ability to leverage data as a strategic business asset.
The case for this national recognition rests on three converging forces creating significant challenges for American businesses:
- AI adoption is stalling due to data governance gaps. Enterprise businesses recognize that AI is core to their competitive differentiation, and those who don’t implement AI strategies risk being left behind. However, the majority of AI initiatives have been halted before reaching production because organizations cannot answer critical questions: What data will this expose? Which datasets were used for training? How do we prevent model bias? Without proper data governance frameworks, companies can’t safely capitalize on AI opportunities, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.
- Complex cloud environments are causing organizations to lose track of their most sensitive information across distributed platforms. This convergence has created a perfect storm of operational challenges where organizations have expanded their data footprints faster than their ability to secure them, leaving blind spots where sensitive information remains untracked and ungoverned. This lack of visibility increases compliance risks and operational inefficiencies.
- Evolving regulatory requirements around digital sovereignty are creating new compliance obligations that will fundamentally change how businesses manage and secure their data. With Gartner predicting over 50% of multinational organizations will implement digital sovereign strategies by 2029, organizations need a unified approach to data visibility and compliance. Businesses are struggling to adapt to rapidly shifting regulatory landscapes that could render current data security and management practices obsolete overnight.
Who created this day? This day was created by Bedrock Data in 2025.