How does your production data can be protected for test, dev, security and or training ?
This question permit me to introduce the Data masking who is a technique used by the enterprise (that care about your data) to protect sensitive data by obscuring or encrypting it in some way.
All the enterprise grade or organizations complied with security controls that protect the production environement and their data when at rests in storage and when it is in business use, but how to use or share this Data for a specific development or a security test by a tiers or simply to outside this data for a Cloud performance test without divulgation of personnal information ?
That’s where Data Masking anonimization is introduced
Data masking is often used to protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, and personal health information, and is commonly used in industries such as finance, healthcare, and government.
Data masking is also known as data scrambling and data anonymization.
By example: Data anonymization is the process of removing or obscuring personal identifying information from a dataset, making it difficult or impossible to trace the data back to a specific individual.
This can be done through techniques such as removing names, addresses, and other identifying information, or by using pseudonyms, aggregate data, or other methods to obscure the data. The goal of data anonymization is to protect the privacy of individuals while still allowing the data to be used for research, analysis, or other purposes.
The purpose of “data masking” is to create a fully functional copy that can be used in professional enivory and that does not reveal the real data, it is fake but usable data.
Data masking processes use the same data format to emulate the original data, while changing the values of sensitive information.
There is several ways or technice that can be used to modify data, character shuffling, character or word replacement, randomization, cleaning (zero) and encryption to make unreadable without keys.
Each method has its unique advantages.
However, when masking data the values must always be changed in some manner that makes reverse engineering impossible.