The extensive use of business-critical data is an inescapable necessity that, as is also well known, involves your own risks arising from your own use. Therefore, it is necessary to find the point of balance between this requirement in its use and a safety which is also essential.
In this aspect, the data masking It is a very practical and efficient security technology to protect information while remaining functional in operating and development environments. It is simply about achieving security in the management of test and development data, as well as in everyday work environments in order to reduce risks and vulnerabilities sensitive data.
Despite this, the safe use of data through data masking solutions needs an adequate implementation carrying out good practices that guarantee compliance with the organization's security policies, as well as the data protection regulations.
The essential rules of data masking
The golden rules of data masking refer to standards and good practices for the correct implementation and administration of security with respect to sensitive information in the company. Then, let's see 5 golden rules of data masking, The fulfillment of which will facilitate being able to benefit from its potentialities and advantages:
- Keep a realistic view: Although the data undergoes a transformation procedure, it must be coherent enough with itself and with the context to help the work. When applying the masking rules and techniques, a greater or lesser level of obfuscation will be sought, always in accordance with the needs you have but always while maintaining the realism of the data. In summary, without hiding, encrypt or restrict the information to be able to work in realistic scenarios with fictitious but representative data of the original.
- It is not a reversible procedure: It's about a procedure that does not allow to go back. Data is permanently transformed. In other words, it is not feasible to retrieve the initial data, with what this impossibility of decoding reinforces the security of the information. At the same time it is a functional and real information for all our systems, has no turning back, making it impossible for the data to return to its original state and thanks to this we avoid the dangers of encryption.
- Opt for selective masking: Everything should not be masked, only critical information, the one that we consider important and also vulnerable. In this aspect, the automation of the procedure provided by advanced solutions speeds up the identification of sensitive data and the actual execution of the masking procedure according to predefined rules.
- The relevance of integrity: Maintaining referential integrity is key to successful data masking. Even if, as we have pointed out, the data is fictitious, must preserve its integrity to maintain that functionality for each masked data. For this, it will be necessary to perform an identical masking for each element as many times as it is repeated.
- A repeatable procedure: Data masking transcends an initial implementation. Masked data must be masked repeatedly for consistency in parallel with possible changes that occur. Here again, automation is essential for masking to be an efficient procedure.
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