Software AG has launched Data Masking for Adabas, a solution created to enable Adabas customers to design and test applications using actual production data that has been altered to ensure the privacy and security of the data itself.
"Data Masking for Adabas is for our Adabas customers that need to create testing or outsourcing environments - or anything that is considered a non-production environment," Bruce Beaman, senior director, product marketing, at Software AG, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "By being able to mask this data they will be able to comply with data protection regulations such as HIPAA and the EU Data Protection Directive and others that basically say you can't put sensitive data out there for people to work with, even in non-production environments."
According to Software AG, developers building applications designed to interact with data in Adabas need real data against which to test and refine their applications in test or QA environments, but the problem is that the real data often contains highly sensitive information such as customer names, credit card numbers, and medical information.
Up until now, the process of protecting Adabas data in test or QA environments was "very laborious," says Beaman. An organization could extract a snapshot of corporate data from Adabas and preserve its anonymity manually, ensuring that sensitive information has been stripped out, and dummy values or text had been inserted. However, that process is time- and resource-intensive-and subject to human error and oversight. "You can appreciate how time-consuming it is, and how prone to error something like that can be when you are dealing with a lot of data," Beaman notes.
Data Masking for Adabas is intended to automate this process and ensure that potentially sensitive data remains anonymous and secure throughout various Adabas database environments. In addition, the solution retains the integrity of the original environment, so that developers can work with data that is sufficiently ‘production-like' to stand in for actual production data.
For more information about Data Masking for Adabas, go to www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/adabas_2010/compliance/default.asp.