As the Product Manager for Data Express at Micro Focus one of the most frequent questions I’ve been asked in the last year is “What about X?”. If you’ve got to mask your test data for compliance to PCI, HIPAA, the EU Data Directive, etc. then of course you’ve got to mask all of it – that includes not only major Data Stores like DB2 and Oracle but COBOL Files, Sybase, MySQL and even XML amongst many. At the same time the compliance need is real and significant regardless of whether you happen to have a mainframe or not, data is data regardless of the platform it’s stored on. With the latest release of Data Express http://www.microfocus.com/products/dataexpress/ we’ve taken away the mainframe dependency and added an ODBC Extension – almost all the data stores you can imagine on Windows, UNIX and Linux have an ODBC Driver and this enables consistent Data Masking across all those platforms.
To go back a step - Why Mask? That’s a legitimate question and certainly typical production systems have many secure layers around them, but what about development systems and testing? When real data is used for testing you can potentially create an open back door to data privacy and security.
I also put Subsetting in the title of this blog, and that’s because using real data in testing may be the right thing to do for quality, but as well as having sensitive information often it’s huge. Managing additional copies of that data and trying to turn it into meaningful can be a very resource intensive and time consuming process – an automated and repeatable system that gives you much reduced but still realistic test data can save a lot of time and money.
Well, more about some of these topics in later blogs and of course at Micro Focus Live, meantime discussion on this blog forum is very welcome.