It seems like masks are all over the news right now, but does your most business-critical asset have a mask? Protecting your organization’s sensitive data has never been more important and the consequences of a data breach can be dire, resulting in fines and damage to your reputation.

Find out how you can protect your organization from data breaches and regulatory action, while maintaining the utility of your sensitive data, by putting a mask on it.

New regulations, the increasing pace of high-profile data breaches, and the realities of our connected world demand an effective approach to data security. Yet, you still need to use your sensitive data for everyday business activities. While your team knows to take care of this critical information, accidental exposures happen more often than you may realize.

Studies have shown that more than a quarter of all data exposure incidents involve accidental or intentional breaches by business insiders – employees and contractors. So, what can you do to protect your sensitive data while still being able to use it for vital, legitimate business purposes?

Data masking is the best way to protect sensitive data while maintaining usability. Masking replaces identified values with functional, fictitious information that looks and works like real data while effectively concealing sensitive information.

Masked data protects your organization by:

• Obscuring sensitive data from unauthorized users during legitimate and routine business activities, such as application development, software testing, employee training, bug fixes, or data analysis and analytics modeling projects
• Keeping data safe during transit, in the cloud, and on your home network
• Mitigating insider risks such as accidental data exposure, device theft, or unauthorized download or transmission
• Meeting regulatory compliance requirements such as PCI-DSS, GLBA, OSFI/PIPEDA, HIPAA, FERPA, GDPR

You may not realize how much of your data requires protection. Data protection regulations cover personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, payment card information, intellectual property, and health data. Masked data is kept safe but still useful for critical business functions because it still looks and works just like the real data even though it is entirely fictitious. For example, credit card data would still appear as a 16-digit number, but the numbers have been changed to protect the true values.

With more than a decade solving clients’ cyber security challenges, Accutive has the expertise required to help our customers keep their sensitive data both safe and useable.

Our Data Discovery and Masking solution simplifies and streamlines functional data protection for organizations of any size by:

• Shielding sensitive data in non-production environments while maintaining data utility for a variety of critical purposes
• Keeping QA environments refreshed for effective testing with masked production data
• Mitigating risks associated with third party data sharing
• Identifying sensitive data for audit or additional protection

Our solution empowers clients to identify sensitive data across virtually any database and define what elements should be masked, such as social security numbers, date of birth, address, or credit card numbers. Then we work with you to define the most effective data masking approach for your organization – current database, source to source copy, or copy to a flat file – and establish a masking frequency schedule, such as a monthly QA refresh with masked production data.

With 10+ years’ experience in financial services technology consulting, Accutive is a strong partner to help you keep your sensitive data safe and useful. Our team of consultants will work with you to define your data masking needs, configure a solution, and get you up and running in less time than you think.

Find out more about our solutions and capabilities or get in touch to get product pricing and talk with our experts about putting a mask on your data.