How to mitigate the risk of a data breach in non-production environments

This report warns that non-production systems often contain real or lightly masked production data yet lack production-grade security, creating preventable data breach risk through lost devices, insider misuse, misconfigured cloud storage, and targeted attacks. It recommends raising non-production security to production standards by enforcing MFA, network isolation and microsegmentation, de-identifying or synthesizing test data, securing physical and endpoint assets, automating patching, and integrating monitoring/EDR to detect and prevent exfiltration.