One of the most challenging question in data space is - how can I entrust my data to other teams, within or outside the firm? Answer to this question is far from obvious, as strict SOX, HIPAA, CISP, ISO 27001 compliance requirements place most emphasis on limiting the direct access to data by anyone including your own employees.

It is assumed that all applications have to have fairly secured and strong encrypted interfaces to the underlying data. But, there are times when data needs to be shared across departments, groups or other inside/outside teams. Applications require good quality data to do any meaningful development, testing and maintenance.

If the teams can do with dummy data, then the following options arise:

Create Dummy data through data entry screens
Manually convert few records into dummy, and remove the remaining
Automatically convert all records into dummy with no reverse conversion possible

First two options cause wastage of time, and have limitations, risks and possibility of human errors during manual conversion. Our solution is simpler, cleaner and faster - use data masking! DM application allows converting your valuable data into a heap of useless data chunks which cannot be reverse engineered in fraction of seconds or minutes depending on data volume. Most importantly, resulting garbage data preserves all data relationships and is perfectly usable by your existing software without causing any screen to break. With just a few clicks, your team members can convert useful data into a non guessable data to be given to the interested parties. Selection could be at the entire database level, or individual tables, or even at a field level. Output schema is always separate, and a full export could be done without worrying about unmasked data slipping into the data dump. What's more - choices made during such conversion can be saved as templates, and next time just use one of these templates to expedite the process.

Amvrin's data masking application is more than that - it just replaces existing data bit-by-bit fully preserving data relationships, types and pre and post conditions. Complex data porting algorithms involving data mutation and random numbers have developed over years and allow preserving all constraints, integrity and relationships within the data elements.

Generated data has precisely the same names for tables, fields, data types, rules, etc (each of these elements could also be renamed), and it can be used perfectly outside the production environments for development, testing, or training.

DM is a standards based product that can either be deployed as a stand alone application, or used in conjunction with your application framework. Developed using J2EE and MySQL, application is fairly easy-to-use or learn, and could be used by any team.

Version 2.03 of this application is the current stable release. Version 2.1 is under development to add more features, and databases.

Usage:

Development, Testing environment without compromising data privacy and confidentiality Stay SOX compliant by removing a need for production quality data in Test/Dev environments Provide the masked data to Offshore or Outsource providers without any worry of reverse engineering, or a loss of privacy Generate production size load without corrupting data, or without manual involvement in copying data

Advantages:

Structure, length and validations of masked data remain precisely same as the real data Data relationships are 100% preserved, requiring no changes to the coding to accommodate test data Anyone can generate masked data in seconds or few minutes (depending on data size)

Cutting Edges:

Based on open standards Java & MySQL Solution equally well suited for large, medium or small enterprises Masking methods, criteria and formats could be saved in XML format as templates for later use