Compuware has announced a major upgrade to its test data management solution. Test Data Privacy 3.1 aims to simplify the creation and disguising of test data in non-production environments, lowering the total cost of an enterprise-wide data privacy implementation. With increasing competitive pressures on companies to shorten time-to-market results for delivering high-quality applications, Compuware says the new release raises data disguise to the level specified in privacy legislation, enabling compliance departments to monitor progress while reducing the burden of implementation and maintenance from IT.
The release of Test Data Privacy 3.1 is significant because it enables an enterprise-wide approach to test data privacy, Dennis O'Flynn, product management director at Compuware, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We have a new user interface that will allow you to interact with both distributed and mainframe data so that a consistent approach can be applied to data privacy." The product spans database platforms such as Oracle, SQL Server, and Sybase, as well as DB2 and IMS on the mainframe, flat file systems and XML, says O'Flynn.
With Test Data Privacy 3.1, businesses can securely and cost-effectively test applications using production scenarios and neutralize the risk of a data breach. The 3.1 release streamlines the creation and maintenance of disguise rules, while providing increased transparency for compliance-level personnel. An organization's compliance-level personnel now have a convenient tool to directly define the rules for disguising data (e.g., substituting data with random characters, or altering all numbers by a certain percentage). In addition, comprehensive coverage reports assist by giving visibility to the expected results that are then confirmed with the final audit reports
These activities are completed in the new Compuware Workbench, an interactive developer environment for all data types across the enterprise. The custom disguise rules are stored in a central repository and are dynamically applied when test data is extracted from production, establishing collaboration between compliance and IT. "With our tool we have a role-based approach," says O'Flynn. This allows the compliance officer or department to set up a consistent set of privacy rules that can be used against data, setting the guidelines for how data should be disguised or masked, while the development team uses the rules to generate their test data. "That way we really get a separation of duties between compliance dept and the development staff, but at the same time, they can use the same set of tooling."
New features in Compuware Test Data Privacy 3.1 include:
- Central rules repository to manage all rules: Shared rules are created using the Compuware Workbench and stored in a central repository, which is then accessed when extracting sets of test data.
- Rules apply to all supported platforms: Rules defined in the repository will produce consistent data disguise results when applied to fields of different data types and lengths.
- Eclipse-based user interface: The Compuware Workbench provides users with an industry-standard interface from which to mask data across the enterprise.
- Simplified disguise techniques: Supported masking techniques include encryption, translation, user-defined functions and functions to allow date aging.
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Role-based authorization: Provides the ability to customize permission levels for the data disguise functions, such as administration, disguise or monitoring, based on the role of the user.