Enterprises increasingly using the cloud for their test and development spin-ups, to make development instances quickly available for application development teams. This process empowers organizations to assume a faster release cycle, use DevOps, and enjoy the nimbleness and flexibility of the cloud. Using clones of production data can create a replica of sensitive information in a cloud database in the clear that may violate security and compliance policies or may not receive the same level of security that a production environment typically receives. The downstream effect is that a non-production deployment without protection may be left running, and as a result, an attacker or Internet scanner may uncover cleartext records.”]
Source: https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/controlling-data-leakage-in-cloud-test-dev-environments