Data Subset and Masking

The Challenge

Your organization needs to protect more and more data being shared in more ways than ever before. You may be concerned about protecting data in a variety of scenarios:

  • Protecting proprietary/competitive/sensitive information in both non-production and in production applications.
  • Test and QA groups need “real” data to test properly, and in many cases these are outsourced groups.
  • Compliance with privacy regulations or policies including PHI, PII, and HIPAA as part of a data governance initiative.

The Alternatives

The primary alternative is building a custom data masking solution in-house. The question is: “Can you prove to an auditor or government regulator not only that you have a process in place but that it is actually being used and that it is effective?”

While it might not be difficult for some administrators to write scripts to mask data, most homegrown solutions are not sophisticated and do not provide the complete end-to-end capabilities that an enterprise class masking solution requires.

Our Solution

Southport Data Masking. This capability allows your organization to mask data in two ways:

  • Persistent Data Masking – allows your organization to capture and mask production data for application development, testing and training purposes.
    • Can be used in conjunction with data subset capabilities.
    • Maintains Referential Integrity.
    • Define policies once, apply many times.
    • A variety of masking algorithms provided, including best practices “packs” for PII, PHI, and PCI.
  • Dynamic Data Masking – provides real-time, policy-driven obfuscation of sensitive data without requiring any changes to database or application source code.
    • The only packaged solution available on the market.
    • Dynamically applies masking rules via real time SQL rewrite without changing the underlying data.
    • Minimal performance impact.
    • Masking rules can be applied based upon database user/role context.

Who Benefits?

If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, you may benefit from Southport Data Masking capabilities:

  • Have you ever had any security breaches with your in-house application data?
  • Do you have a need to provide greater security for your test, development, and quality assurance environments?
  • Do you create non-production copies of your data for test, development, or quality assurance that must be masked to secure sensitive data?
  • Would off-the-shelf data masking functionality specifically developed for Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Siebel in your test, development, and QA environments be of interest to you?
  • Are there government regulations that require you to protect sensitive data no matter where it resides within your organization?
  • Are there any industry standards for data privacy that you must adhere to?
  • Are you having trouble managing masking rules consistently across all of your production applications?

To learn more about this offering, please contact us.