Discovering Your Sensitive Data

After connecting data to the masking service, the next step is to discover which of the data should be secured. This sensitive data discovery is done using two different methods, column-level profiling, and data level profiling.

Column Level Profiling
Column level profiling uses regular expressions (regex) to scan the metadata (column names) 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 your own profile Expressions.

First Name Expression <([A-Z][A-Z0-9])\b[^>]>(.*?)</\1>

Data Level Profiling
Data level profiling also uses regex, but to scan the actual data instead of the metadata. Similar to column level profiling, there are several dozen pre-configured Expressions (like the one below) and you can add your own.

Social Security Number Expression <([A-Z][A-Z0-9])\b[^>]>(.*?)</\1>

For both column and data level profiling, when a data item is identified as sensitive, Delphix recommends/assigns particular masking 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.