The presence of sensitive data within organizations and businesses is common. Actually, it’s an integral part of a business and Data Masking Important?
For any kind of business, the data is the most important fundamentals of its working. It doesn’t matter what kind of data you are recording in your business unless it’s not safeguarded, you might as well kiss your authenticity goodbye.
Technology is improvising day by day. Not only are the security systems focusing more on getting secure, but so are the hackers as they try to force their way in all kinds of sensitive data and businesses.
The different types of threats that an organizations data face are evolving every now and then. The worst part is that the consequences could be severe every time or sometimes, totally destructive for a business. Thus, it only makes sense if you take hundreds of factors into consideration when it comes to securing databases.
As such, businesses are moving towards a more secure data security model – Data Masking which helps you mask data for safeguarding it from potential threats.
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The importance of Data Masking for enterprises
Data Masking is more of a viable technology that plays an important role to secure your personal data. Data, in different scenarios and environments, are exposed to threats of all kinds. Data masking safeguards data from such incidents.
Some of the key benefits of data masking are:
It helps meet compliance requirements
European Union (EU) passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that?s intended to strengthen the personal data protection and avoid breaches in personal data.
The PCI and HIPAA mandate that any kind of (sensitive) data in any directory, file or channel needs to be secured and only allowed to be accessed by such parties that have the authorization to access this data.
Now as we all know by now, data masking plays an important role in protecting sensitive data in all kinds of environments, particularly in non-production environments such as testing, development, etc.?
The same could be done by de-identifying the data so that the privileged users can?t view it at all.
The developers and testers, included in the privileged users don?t have to view the sensitive data at all because testing or developing an application doesn?t require access to sensitive data. Anyway, this sensitive data only contributes to a small part of the overall data.
Minimizing information risk
During outsourcing or off sharing your sensitive data, a lot of organizations might not even consider increasing their data-level security or depersonalizing sensitive data. This could potentially lead to a loss of very vital information.
A lot of enterprises rely on? trusted parties when off-shoring or outsourcing the data to different vendors.
This data is subject to breach from outside parties in case the parties? systems are insecure or have a threat posed against them.
Data masking technology, however, helps preserve and conceal the private data and protects it from being misused or stolen.
Protection of sensitive data in a non-production environment
As the private data is pushed towards its final stages of production, enterprises usually make a copy of such data which could be used for testing or applications or general QA purposes.
This copied data could potentially face the same risks as that of the original data if it’s not secured.?
Data masking in such cases helps to ensure that all kinds of data types and sensitive data are being masked before it?s sent for testing.
Does this help in concealing the data’s original value.
Conclusion
Enterprises need to have strong security over their private data, now more than ever.
It does’t matter where data is being stored, what purpose it’s serving, or how many authorized users it has, it is still vulnerable to attacks.
Data Masking is an enhanced security module which actually has proved to be vital in preserving the data in its natural state and tackle security threats every now and then.
For preserving the data, the first step is to identify the sensitive data. If all data is masked, it?s going to be hard and time-consuming to access it. And if no data is masked, you already know the consequences.
Loss of vital data always has a negative impact on a business that definitely includes financial and legal losses.?
Resorting to data masking is always the right strategy when the safety and security of data are your primary concerns.