What Are the Best Data Leak Prevention Strategies for 2025?

This document is a 30-point best-practices guide for preventing data breaches that emphasizes knowing and cataloging sensitive data and assets, enforcing identity and access controls (least-privilege, MFA, password hygiene), securing devices and cloud configurations, applying timely patches, encrypting data at rest and in transit, maintaining backups and incident response capabilities, and implementing vendor risk management and continuous monitoring to reduce breach risk and improve response.