The features and benefits of the Grid-Tools Fast Data Masking™ software

Why should you use Fast Data Masking™ to secure your sensitive data records?

Many large, small and important organizations are struggling with copies of production for test and development when better alternatives are at their fingertips. The ability to create small, secure versions of databases is invaluable to test and development teams. Fast Data Masking™ for Oracle, Teradata and SQL Server has an array of functions to help organizations manage their large test databases. It quickly masks data in seconds, and no other tool will out-perform the Fast Data Masking™ runtimes.

Data can be extracted from production to flat file or other formats for use offsite, or it can be masked, reorganized and compressed in situ using a combination of high-performance techniques. Systems analysts can choose from a rich array of standard functions and standard seed tables complemented by their own custom masking functions. Once the rules have been defined, a powerful set of scripts are generated to quickly extract the data or mask the data in situ. The scripts use standard database utilities and techniques to maximize performance

"The depersonalisation features of the Grid-Tools software removed headaches for us, as we can now easily demonstrate compliance with data protection rules."

Nigel Williams, Senior Systems Consultant, Watson Wyatt

Features and benefits include:

• Data discovery techniques to identify sensitive data and report back recommendations
• Produces actionable intelligence reports
• Improves regulatory compliance
• Scales for enterprise-wide data masking and data discovery
• Easy to use and deploy
• Little to no dependency for professional services in implementation
• Pre-defined templates for PCI DSS and HIPAA (and PII compliance)

Management features include:

• Managing constraints and foreign keys
• Recompiling affected objects
• Applying compression to reduce space and improve performance
• Rebuilding indexes
• Rebuilding catalog statistics
• Securing the database in exclusive secured mode during masking
• Preview data before masking
• Design and build once – run many times
• No license restrictions on the number of target databases and copies of the masked data
• Strong version and audit control
• The same rule set can be used to generate synthetic data directly into testing and development databases
• One tool can be used for all of your other data sources: DB2, mainframe, flat files, etc.

High performance data masking techniques include:

• Database subsetting: reduce the footprint and time to mask by ignoring old and redundant data
• Unix parallelism: use the power of Unix to submit multiple processes at the same time
• Oracle parallelism: use Oracle’s parallel load facility to maximize data loads
• Logging management: reducing logging during the masking process will reduce the run times
• Optimised masking functions: ensuring that the minimum amount of code to mask the data is executed
• Staging tables: performing large updates in situ can be very slow using shadow tables and renaming them back to the original name is much faster

 

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