And these risks are not merely academic. The Ponemon Institute's study, sponsored by , a provider of secure access and collaboration products and services, found that 90 percent of organizations experienced leakage or loss of sensitive confidential documents during the last 12 months.

Security firm Symantec, in its , released in June, found that two-thirds of businesses had lost important information in the past 12 months due to causes ranging from human error, hardware failure, software failure and lost or stolen mobile devices. Symantec also found that two-thirds of businesses had exposed confidential information outside the organization in the past year, and almost one-third had regulatory compliance issues related to their information in the same period.

"It's really unstructured information that is the life's blood of most organizations," says Ryan Kalember, chief product officer at WatchDox. "Financial documents, image files, PDFs all of this incredibly sensitive information exists in file or document form. Businesses have done a lot of work in securing information in databases, but we haven't really taken a look at files because they're so much harder to secure."

And in many cases, it is an organization's employees that are putting that life's blood at risk, often because they are trying to be more productive. Network security specialist studied application usage in 2,036 organizations worldwide between November 2011 and May 2012 and found an average of 13 different browser-based file sharing documents on each network. The Ponemon Institute's study found that 51 percent of respondents said their employees use at least one browser-based file sharing tool, and 34 percent said they did not know the extent to which these tools were being used in the workplace.

IT and Security Practioners At a Loss