Data Masking and Test Data Management for Financial Firms
Grid-Tools has experience in working with some of the world’s most important financial institutions on test data management initiatives. With Grid-Tools, organizations are able to implement best practice techniques, save time and money and develop better testing and development results and standards. Grid-Tools’ success with financial firms stems from a unique approach, a niche solution and an unparalleled track-record.
The Finance Regulatory Overview
Financial services providers have increased their focus on risk management in recent years due to regulatory, market and competitive pressures. Likewise, recent data breaches globally have caused a boost in CEO awareness, increasing the risks to corporate branding and reputation. The combination of these pressures has recently caused a shift in emphasis and data security is now being taken seriously across the board.
In the last decade, new regulatory initiatives internationally have consistently evolved; the UK’s Data Protection Act, The European Data Protection Directive, PCI DSS, the USA’s Patriot Act, the GLBA, MIFID, International Accounting Standards Board and Sarbanes Oxley are just some of regulatory measures causing a stir in the industry. Financial organizations need to react quickly to changes and increase their compliance monitoring and enforcement measures.
Enforcing compliance measures and standards creates a strain on current data management practices. Initiatives to achieve compliance must be enforced, but the organization must also maintain the ability to share, integrate and manipulate enterprise data in multiple formats for business purposes. Many financial organizations are looking for sophisticated data solutions.
Grid-Tools offer the flexibility of leveraging production-like data for effective testing, development, training and use in QA environments. In every instance, Grid-Tools strive to reduce complexity, reduce test cycles, maintain compliance standards and increase the quality of the data that is being used. The end objective is to change the overall test data management strategy by offering best practice processes and solutions.
Grid-Tools – delivering compliant, flexible and reusable data for Financial Firms
Your organization’s test data management initiatives are likely to focus on the generation or creation of compliant test or development data, and the management of this data. Many financial organizations are looking to share and manipulate production-like data across their test and development teams in highly complex environments.
Due to recent regulatory initiatives globally, organizations are strongly discouraged or restricted from using “live” data in non-production environments. Likewise, in order to reduce complexity, reduce storage costs and increase productivity, many organizations are looking for alternatives to using and maintaining copies of large production databases in non-production environments.
Grid-Tools offer the flexibility of creating data which models the referential and business integrity of production environments, creating secure subset databases, and/or masks and anonymizes production data; providing your organization with rich, compliant data sets. The result is less data, but more variety. This offers a flexible solution and a strategic method, with the data transforming into a reusable asset.
The creation of synthetic or masked data targets the problem of editing, hacking and manipulating production data; reducing test and development cycles, reducing disk space and saving time and money. It also eliminates the need to manually ensure your company’s financial records remain confidential.
“The lack of referential integrity in the data we were using was causing the applications to fail in the test database on one of our current projects. This had a large impact on the test team, as our testers were trying to set-up test conditions with little regard to data integrity. We used Datamaker to create referential data from the ground up, which tackled these problems.”
Chris Mercer, VocaLink
DatamakerThe world´s most powerful test data generation, data obfuscation and database subsetting software
