What is data masking in Oracle?

Enterprises on a wide scale are one the risk of breaching sensitive information. These risks are frequent during copying production data into non-production environments for a variety of reasons like testing, QA, or data analysis and development. Read more about data masking in oracle

Then comes the Oracle data masking into picture which helps eliminate this risk by replacing the original sensitive data with fictitious data so that any risks of breaches and hacking would be eliminated and that it could be shared safely with the non-production users without worrying for its safety.?

Oracle Data Masking is accessible through Oracle Enterprise Manager and is known to provide end-to-end secure automation (not encryption) for provisioning the test database and make them align with the regulations.

Data Masking is an innovative concept that helps secure your personal data. Data, in different scenarios and environments, are exposed to threats of all kinds. Data masking safeguards data from such incidents.

It also enables enterprises to generate fully functional data with similar characteristics as that of the original value. This helps replace sensitive information and send out the data without any hesitation.

At this point, if your question is? Is data masking the same as data encryption?, let me tell you that no (neglecting a few characteristics that are resembling in both these concepts), data masking, and data encryption aren’t same at all.

Data Masking contrasts with encryption that just hides the data. When the data is decrypted, the original data could be retrieved with appropriate access or key.?

However, with data masking, the original data can’t be accessed.?

Data Masking in Oracle Overview

The Oracle Data Masking is a major part of the Oracle?s official portfolio of database security solutions.

This could also be used to mask the data in databases that aren’t necessarily Oracle-based.

However, for a lot of scenarios and masking processes, the Oracle Database 11g is preferred.

The Oracle Data Masking also helps the organizations to comply with all kinds of data privacy requirements and other kinds of requirements that potentially curtail the use of the actual customer data. It could prove very useful for data that are sent for testing, development, and other purposes, along with outsourcing the vendors for nonproduction data purposes.

Oracle Security Offerings

Keeping data masking aside for a minute, here are some of the security products Oracle and provide:

A Virtual Private Database

This product is easily able to hide the rows and the data depending on user access grants. It’s perfect for a working environment.

Transparent Data Encryption

It can hide the information that’s stored on disk. However, it uses encryption and the clients can see the information when it’s unencrypted or when they have the authorization.

DBMS_CRYPTO

It provides all kinds of server packages that allow you to encrypt the user data.

Database Vault

It provides great access control on your data.

Data Masking in Oracle: Role of Data Masking Users

For a typical enterprise, the following users participate in the data masking process:

Application Developer

An application developer (or an application database manager) has abundant knowledge about the fundamentals of the application and the different objects included in the database. The user might also add custom database objects like the Oracle E-business Suite.

Information Security Administrator

An Information security administrator puts forward the fundamentals of information security policies and enforces some of the best security practices.

He also recommends what data needs to be hidden and what needs to be masked.