Test data management and data security for utilities companies
Test data management for the utilities sector
The energy and utilities sector has undergone major changes in recent years, including privatisation and deregulation. The decline of nationalised providers has opened up a highly-competitive commercial utilities marketplace. As a result, utilities companies are looking to exploit every possible marketing and operational efficiency advantage they can over competitors. Invariably, this means collecting as much data as they can about customers and integrating it all into new, accessible, single databases. In light of all this data handling, it is crucial that utilities companies are able to maintain total compliance with the industry’s regulatory standards. In a customer-centred business, this is vital to success. This is why many of the sector’s leading CEO's are beginning to look at how to address the balance between provisioning accessible, complex data and maintaining compliance.
Grid-Tools has experience of working with several large government departments to increase efficiency and maintain regulatory compliance on large development projects. Using a range of niche, unique solutions, Grid-Tools is able to help government departments and agencies deliver:
- Full compliance with national and international data protection standards
- High quality, re-usable synthetic test data
- Efficient and easy-to-use test data management solutions and software
- Testing and development strategies for increased short and long-term efficiency
Creating usable and compliant test data for the utilities sector
In order to run a successful, compliant development project, it is vital to provision high-quality test data. However, current regulations mean that using ‘live’ data in a non-production environment is no longer acceptable. Therefore, leading utilities companies have begun to start re-evaluating the way in which they provision their test data for development projects to comply with this standard.
In the past, data masking has been seen as an adequate method for de-identifying production data for testing. However, it fails to sufficiently meet the needs of modern retailers; their databases contain too much Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and commercially sensitive data. Masking such large and complex amounts of data in a non-production is also inefficient, and runs the risk of compromising relational integrity. So, how then, do we provision useful and compliant test data? The answer is synthetic data creation! Grid-Tools offer 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.
