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Introduction to Delphix Masking

Challenge

With data breach incidents regularly making the news and increasing pressure from regulatory bodies and consumers alike, organizations must protect sensitive data across the enterprise. Contending with insider and outsider threats while staying compliant with mandates such as HIPAA, PCI, and GDPR is no easy task—especially as teams simultaneously try to make their organizations more agile.

To tackle the problem of protecting sensitive information, companies are increasingly scrutinizing the tools they’ve deployed. Instead of reactive perimeter defenses, security minded organizations must focus on proactively protecting the interior of their systems: their data. Moreover, while mainstay approaches such as encryption may be effective for securing data-in-motion or data resident in hard drives, they are ill-suited for protecting non-production environments for development, testing, and reporting.

Solution

The masking capability of the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform represents an automated approach to protecting non-production environments, replacing confidential information such as social security numbers, patient records, and credit card information with fictitious, yet realistic data.

Unlike encryption measures that can be bypassed through schemes to obtain user credentials, masking irreversibly protects data in downstream environments. Consistent masking of data while maintaining referential integrity across heterogeneous data sources enables Delphix masking to provide superior coverage compared to other solutions—all without the need for programming expertise. Moreover, the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform seamlessly integrates masking with data delivery capabilities, ensuring the security of sensitive data before it is made available for development and testing, or sent to an offsite data center or the public cloud.

Delphix Masking is a multi-user, browser-based web application that provides complete, secure, and scalable software for your sensitive data discovery, masking and tokenization needs, while meeting enterprise-class infrastructure requirements. The Delphix Dynamic Data Platform has several key characteristics to enable your organization to successfully protect sensitive data across the enterprise:

  • End-to-End Masking — The Delphix platform automatically detects confidential information, irreversibly masks data values, then generates reports and email notifications to confirm that all sensitive data has been masked.

  • Realistic Data — Data masked with the Delphix platform is production-like in quality. Masked application data in non-production environments remains fully functional and realistic, enabling the development of higher-quality code.

  • Masking Integrated with Virtualization — Most masking solutions fail due to the need for repeated, lengthy batch jobs for extracting and masking data and lack delivery capabilities for downstream environments. The Delphix Dynamic Data Platform seamlessly integrates data masking with data virtualization, allowing teams to quickly deliver masked, virtual data copies on premises or into private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.

  • Referential Integrity — Delphix masks consistently across heterogeneous data sources. To do so, metadata and data is scanned to identify and preserve the primary/foreign key relationships between elements so that data is masked the same way across different tables and databases.

  • Algorithms/Frameworks — Seven algorithm frameworks allow users to create and configure algorithms to match specific security policies. Over twenty five out-of-the-box, preconfigured algorithms help businesses mask everything from names and addresses to credit card numbers and text fields. Moreover, the Delphix platform includes prepackaged profiling sets for healthcare and financial information, as well as the ability to perform tokenization: a process that can be used to obfuscate data sent for processing, then reversed when the processed data set is returned.

  • Ease of Use — With a single solution, Delphix customers can mask data across a variety of platforms. Moreover, businesses are not required to program their own masking algorithms or rely on extensive administrator involvement. Our web-based UI enables masking with a few mouse clicks and little training.

  • Automated discovery of sensitive data — The Delphix Profiler automatically identifies sensitive data across databases and files, the time-consuming work associated with a data masking project is reduced significantly.

High Level Platform Architecture

The Delphix Dynamic Data Platform is made up of 4 main services each of which play a very important part in delivering fresh secure data to anybody that needs it. These include:

  • Virtualize — Delphix compresses the data that it gathers, often to one-third or more of the original size. From that compressed data footprint, Delphix virtualizes the data and allows operators to create lightweight, virtual data copies. Virtual copies are fully readable/writable and independent. They can be spun up or torn down in just minutes. And they take up a fraction of the storage space of physical copies -- 10 virtual copies can fit into the space of one physical copy.

  • Identify and Secure — The Delphix platform continuously protects sensitive information with integrated data masking. Masking secures confidential data -- names, email addresses, patient records, SSNs -- by replacing sensitive values with fictitious, yet realistic equivalents. Delphix automatically identifies sensitive values then applies custom or predefined masking algorithms. By seamlessly integrating data masking and provisioning into a single platform, Delphix ensures that secure data delivery is effortless and repeatable.

  • Manage — Data operators can now quickly provision secure data copies -- in minutes -- to users in their target environments. The Delphix platform serves as a single point of control to manage those copies. Data operators maintain full control and visibility into downstream environments. They can easily audit, monitor, and report against access and usage.

  • Self Service Provides developers, testers, analysts, data scientists, or other users with controls to manipulate data at-will. Users can refresh data to reflect the latest state of production, rewind environments to a prior point in time, bookmark data copies for later use, branch data copies to work across multiple releases, or easily share data with other users.

How Delphix Identifies Sensitive Data

Our platform helps you quickly identify your organization’s sensitive data. This sensitive data identification is done using two different methods, column level profiling and data level profiling.

Column Level Profiling

Column level profiling uses REGEX expressions to scan the column names (metadata) of the selected data sources. There are several dozen pre-configured profile expressions (like the one below) designed to identify common sensitive data types (SSN, Name, Addresses, etc). You also have the ability to write/import your own profile expressions.

Data Level Profiling

Data level profiling also uses REGEX expressions, but to scan the actual data instead of the metadata. Similar to column level profiling, there are sefveral dozen pre-configured expressions (like the one below) and you can write/import your own.

For both column and data level profiling, when data is identified as sensitive, Delphix recommends/assigns particular algorithms to be used when securing the data. The platform comes with several dozen pre-configured algorithms which are recommended when the profiler finds certain sensitive data.

How Delphix Secures Your Sensitive Data

Delphix strives to make available multiple methods for securing your data, depending on your needs. The two secure methods Delphix currently supports are masking (anonymization) and tokenization (pseudonymization).

Masking

Data masking secures your data by replacing values with realistic yet fictitious data. Seven out-of-the-box algorithm frameworks help businesses mask everything from names and social security numbers to images and text fields. Algorithms can also be configured or customized to match specific security policies.

Tokenization

Tokenization uses reversible algorithms so that the data can be returned to its original state. Tokenization is a form of encryption where the actual data – such as names and addresses – are converted into tokens that have similar properties to the original data (text, length, etc.) but no longer convey any meaning.