Secured Data Masking
It is common practice to take the data available in production environments to populate the development and testing environments of the applications; however, this is an incorrect practice as the personnel working in these nonproduction environments, including outsourcers, may not be allowed to work with these data, which can be copied and downloaded.
For this reason, with reference to the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, the European parliament and the council have issued the General Data Protection Regulation (EU Regulation 2016/679). This regulation lays the basis for any legal action that individuals may take if their personal data are not properly protected, and for the consequent criminal implications that the organisation that has not protected – even involuntarily – sensitive data would face.
Secured Data Masking is the ideal solution for data masking, a process that consists of hiding the original data with random characters or random data. The application creates a masked copy of the database on a different environment, physically eliminating the access to sensitive data in the production environment and keeping test and production environments always aligned. It thus prevents accidental data leaks and reduces or eliminates production data exposure, for complete business security.
