Data Masking in TDM

In my previous posts, I explained about the Challenges in Production Cloning.  One of the major challenges in the Production Cloning approach is Data Security.  This post will focus on the solution for Data Security, Data Masking.

As already explained, Data Masking is the process of masking the sensitive fields from the complete data set.    The whole objective of data masking is to ensure that no sensitive data is leaked into non-production regions like the Dev and Testing regions.

What are the sensitive fields that needs to be masked?  That basically depends on the project needs.  But some of the generic fields that need to be masked are:

• Personal information like First names, Last Names, Email IDs, DOB, Phone & Fax numbers, SSN Numbers, National Insurance Numbers, Other national unique identifiers.
• In Banking, Financial Services & Insurance industry - Bank Balances, Account numbers, Credit card numbers, Policy numbers, etc.
• In Healthcare industry - PHI attributes like Medical record numbers, Member IDs, etc.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but will give a fair idea of how many fields are sensitive in nature that needs to be handled with care.  Any lapse in masking any of these fields might have a big impact on the Organization as a whole.

Challenges in Data Masking

Top 3 Challenges in using Production data in Test Environments

In my previous post "How to create Test Data", I explained the concept of creating test data directly from the production data.  In this post we will concentrate on the Top 3 challenges in using the Production data for testing purposes.

Data Security

This is by far the most crucial challenge of using Production data in Test Environments.  Production data can contain a lot of sensitive information.  Even though the data sets will be rich in nature in the Production database, the very thought of using production data involves a lot of risk.  For ex. if you are testing an application for a bank, production data will contain real customer information like Names, Addresses, Account Numbers, Balances, Credit Card Numbers, etc.  As you can see, if you try to use these data for testing, it exposes huge security risks for the bank. So how do we overcome this, the answer is Data Masking.

Data Masking is the process of masking of the sensitive fields from the complete data set.  Please read my future post on Data Masking and the Techniques used for Data Masking for more details.  The following figure depicts the data security challenge and the approaches.

Data Security Challenge