Data Masking for Effective Data Privacy, Security and Compliance
As technology advances, more and more companies are conducting businesses online. Hence, in today’s internet based market, keeping sensitive and critical information safe and secure is a major concern as internet-based cybercrime is becoming increasingly sophisticated. From corporate bank accounts to social security numbers, from credit card details to customer, employee and enterprise information there is nothing that the hackers do not need and they stop at nothing to get hold of confidential information. When cybercriminals penetrate corporate security, the companies and organizations face a lot many issues ranging from huge financial losses, loss of brand loyalty and credibility to legal action by customers and in some cases even by government regulators.
Businesses are investing heavily in threat management solutions to ensure cyber security. Since the entire focus is on protecting the production databases at any cost, enterprises and organizations normally forget about the database clones in non-production environments thereby resulting in data leaks, thefts and accidental data escapes. Extending security umbrella to both production and non-production databases is a costly affair but even that won’t guarantee full protection as the data would still be exposed to trainees, outside consultants, and all those who are not fully security vetted. And if it provides 100% protection then that would interfere with test and development processes as for instance developers would not be able to test new software releases due to their inability to access real production data. That is where data masking tools or database masking comes to the aid. It not only guarantees data privacy, security, and compliance but also helps in providing a valid environment for application testing. So what is Data Masking?
Data Masking
Data masking is the process of masking or obscuring sensitive and confidential data so that the data remains inaccessible during testing and developing processes in non-production environments. It helps in replacing critical data with sensible but not genuine data. Data masking thus helps in preventing data thefts and accidental data escapes as the sensitive data do not go outside of the authorized environment. Thus, it ensures secure testing.
Data masking can be considered effective if it
1. changes actual values so that the sensitive data remains protected both inside and outside of an enterprise or organization
2. reduces the possibility of exposure of sensitive data through database clones, even if the entire cloned database is stolen or made public over the Internet
3. provides a valid data format for testing and developing processes
Hence, companies and organizations must invest in enterprise data management software as it would provide not only effective data masking but also database archiving, application retirement, and test data management.
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