Today’s business requires vast amounts of data and breaches are a critical risk as more organizations embrace digitization and big data.
Every year, world-wide data breaches expose sensitive data from millions of people, costing affected companies hundreds in millions in losses. Advanced, effective data security is an urgent priority for every kind of business and is critical to the success and survival of financial organizations.
According to multiple sources, over the last year 47% of financial data breaches targeted banks, with the IT sector and government sites the next most likely targets.
As risks proliferate, information security options labor to keep pace. One solution leads the pack with effective, reliable protection while maintaining the utility of key data for business-critical functions, such as development, testing, and analysis.
Data Masking Demystified
Data masking shields sensitive information by replacing key data with fictitious details mirroring the original structure and format. The objective is to keep the data useable while effectively obfuscating and protecting sensitive information.
Data masking, or data obfuscation as it’s sometimes called, protects credit card numbers, social security numbers, names, addresses, and contact information from accidental exposure to outside threats and insiders not authorized to access or see sensitive information.
By keeping the original format and structure while changing values, the data remains useful for application development, testing, and analytics purposes, making Data Masking one of the most functional methods of information security.
Why Mask?
Data volumes surge every year, with an estimated 5000% increase over the last decade. Sensitive data within your systems is expanding too, as are the statutes governing security. You may have multiple copies of production data scattered throughout your systems without even realizing they exist. While production databases are frequently well protected, gaps may exist in test environments, stored documents, or third-party access points.
Guarding data from misuse and unauthorized access while preserving utility demands an advanced solution. Data masking effectively obscures sensitive consumer information while the data retains the values and format required to develop and test systems or evaluate customer activities, such as demographics analyses or location-based insurance valuations.
Advantages and Benefits
Data masking yields immediate benefits by reducing the risk of a potential breach. Even if an unauthorized individual, either an employee or third-party, accesses sensitive information in a test environment or analytics database, with Data Masking the details are fictitious and the true data remains safe behind layers of protection in your production database.
Data masking removes the potential exploitation of exposed data and eliminates compliance actions related to a breach. An organization with masked data the hefty costs associated breaches and noncompliance to data security requirements.
Data masking’s many advantages include:
- Preventing data breach, loss, theft, unsecured interface, and unauthorized access or use by company insiders.
- Preserving the core data’s integrity and structural form.
- Allowing secure data sharing with authorized individuals without compromising production data.
- Reducing risks associated with data use in the cloud or on the internet.
- Simplicity, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Accutive Data Masking – We’re Here to Protect You
Data masking delivers highly effective protection for businesses of all sizes. Tailored to fit any business need and protect your most vital resource, data masking increases security compliance and mitigates potential data breach consequences.
Accutive understands the need to both protect and use sensitive data in an environment teeming with cyber threats.
