Data masking and test data management for financial firms

"The Datamaker tool had features we’d never thought of. It not only fulfilled the expectations of our development team, it exceeded them! It was taking us over 20 hours to create data from one row or schema. Once we started using Datamaker, it was taking us less than 2-3 hours"

Large financial institution

Using Grid-Tools in the finance and banking sectors

The recent past has been particularly turbulent in the banking sector, with high-profile data breaches, the collapse of notable institutions and recession all hitting the headlines. The result has been increased regulation and low public confidence. Accordingly, CEO's are starting to turn their attention to meeting two main KPI's (Key Performance Indicators): improved risk management and compliance. However, competitive pressures complicate this, calling for more efficient access to, and integration of, automated data sources across organisations. This is why many organisations are looking for sophisticated solutions to improving efficiency whilst maintaining regulatory compliance.

Grid-Tools has considerable experience of working within the banking sector with national and multinational organisations to improve risk management and ensure full regulatory compliance. Using a range of unique, niche solutions, Grid-Tools can help your financial organisation deliver:

• Full compliance with up-to-date global and national regulation
• High quality, rich, re-usable, secure test data
• Efficient and easy-to-use test data management solutions and software
• Testing and development strategies for increased short-term and long-term operational efficiency

Creating usable and compliant test and development data for banking

In recent years, high profile data breaches have resulted in a constant evolution of regulation in the industry; i.e. PCI DSS, GLBA (USA) and Basel_II. Legislative violations are costly; not only do they result in large fines but they also erode customer confidence. As more and more banks undertake large development projects to modernise their databases, the importance of test data becomes paramount. As the use of ‘live’ data in non-production environments is no longer acceptable by most industry standards, it’s time to re-evaluate the way the banking sector acquires its test data.

In the past, data masking was seen as a way to adequately de-identify production data and provision it for testing. However, masking is insufficient to meet the security needs of the banking sector. The data held by banks is not only highly sensitive and highly sought but often needs to be accessed by a range of people (who may or may not be outsourced). Therefore, it is crucial that there is no possible identifying data that could compromise customer anonymity in the test data. In order to sufficiently mask data of this type in a non-production environment, relational integrity with the ‘live’ data is often compromised, making it useless for good testing. This poses the question, how do we provision useful, high-quality compliant test data for the banking sector without using data masking?

The answer is synthetic data creation! Grid-Tools offers a range of sophisticated, flexible solutions, including the award-winning Datamaker™, which can create data that models the referential and relational integrity of production environments from scratch! For more on how your organisation should be using synthetic data creation for full compliance in development projects, follow this link.

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