9 Best Data Masking Tools

With recent changes to GDPR and other privacy laws, it’s more important than ever before to protect your customers’ personal data.

With that in mind, we’ve looked into the top data masking tools available right now that will help you meet compliance needs while keeping costs low and producing quality software faster.

In this blog post, we will explore some of the best data masking tools in the market.

What is Data Masking?

Data masking is a process that creates a masked version of organizational data while retaining its original structure.

Data masking replaces real values with fictitious ones, preventing the reverse-engineering of sensitive information.

It is commonly used alongside encryption, shuffling, and substitution to provide a comprehensive approach to data security.

It is used to protect confidential information like customer names, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, and other personal information from being exposed.

It also helps organizations comply with certain data protection regulations and guidelines.

By masking data, organizations can still use the data for testing or development purposes without compromising its security or integrity.

How Data Masking Works

It works by replacing sensitive data with “masked” values that look like the original. For example, a customer’s address may be replaced with a fictitious one or their credit card number may be replaced with random digits. This process is done using specialized software or tools that can automatically detect and mask sensitive data.

Data masking can also include redacting data, which is the process of removing sensitive information from a set of records or documents. For example, when an employee leaves a company, it may be necessary to remove their personal information before releasing the document publicly.

What Are Data Masking Tools?

Data masking tools are software applications that are used to apply masking techniques to protect sensitive data. By using a masking tool, organizations can quickly and easily protect their data without having to manually redact or replace it.

Masking tools come in many different forms, ranging from open-source software to commercial products. These tools usually provide an easy-to-use interface that allows users to select the type of data they want to mask and apply the necessary changes with just a few clicks.

What are the Benefits of Data Masking?

Data masking tools provide a number of benefits for organizations, including:

• Lower costs: </strong>Masking data manually can be time-consuming and expensive, but using a masking tool -lasso-id=”12775″>automates the process and makes it much more cost-effective.
• Increased agility: By replacing sensitive data with dummy values, organizations can quickly create a copy of their data for development and testing purposes without exposing sensitive information.

lass=”wp-block-heading”>Top Data Masking Tools</strong>

Here is the list of top data masking tools along with their features.</p>

<strong>#1. Delphix

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Delphix DevOps Data Platform is designed to protect sensitive data across the entire enterprise. It takes care of automatically discovering and masking sensitive data for you. Delphix not only mitigates our risk exposure by masking sensitive data, but it also empowers developers with realistic environments that closely resemble production environments.

Delphix masks data consistently across all data sources. It does this by scanning the metadata and data to identify and preserve the primary/foreign key relationships between elements. This ensures that data is masked in the same way across different tables and databases.

Features:

• • Delphix automatically identifies sensitive information, including names, email addresses, and credit card numbers, across various data sources with precision and efficiency.
  • Delphix effectively obfuscates data values using realistic data, while ensuring full functionality. This facilitates the development of high-quality code.

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Ensures data privacy by effectively masking sensitive information while maintaining realism and referential integrity.
• Enables adherence to data privacy regulations including GDPR, CCPA, and PCI DSS.
• Preconfigured algorithms are a lifesaver for businesses when it comes to masking sensitive information like names, social security numbers, images, and text fields. You can even customize these algorithms to align with your specific security policies.
• It supports all types of apps and databases, including SQL, noSQL, files, mainframe, Salesforce, and more.
• Supports all types of clouds, including PaaS, cloud-native databases, and object storage.
• Provides APIs that you can integrate with CI/CD pipelines

lass=”wp-block-heading”>#2. Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting

Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting is a powerful tool that helps companies protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. It enables organizations to mask or de-identify data for testing, development, and analytics applications. This prevents the exposure of production data in non-production environments.

Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting also makes it easier to comply with privacy regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).

Features:

• Masks static data such as customer information, credit card numbers, and mailing addresses.</li>
• It also offers dynamic data masking, which allows the user to modify existing or new values in a data set such as changing dates, phone numbers, and names.
• Removes any sensitive data from test, development, analytics, and other non-production environments.
• Provides flexible masking techniques to help preserve the unique characteristics of data, ensuring that application functionality remains intact even after masking.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Make your life easier and save time with ready-to-use masking templates for Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Applications.
• It creates smaller data sets that can help save time and storage costs, while also enhancing efficiency and reducing risk.
• Multi-factor subsetting techniques help create data sets that are representative, relevant, and functionally intact.

#3. IRI FieldShield

IRI FieldShield is a robust and cost-effective data discovery and masking software solution designed for PII in both structured and semi-structured sources, regardless of their size. The FieldShield utilities in Eclipse are utilized for profiling and de-identifying static data (static data masking), while the FieldShield SDK is employed for securing data in transit (dynamic data masking).</p> &lt;p>  Features:

• Connect to and protect personally identifiable information (PII) in relational database (RDB) tables, flat files, as well as MongoDB and JSON.
• Automatically scanning and classifying PII, and then applying the same masks across different sources, can help ensure data privacy and security.
• Encrypt and de-ID PII without changing its appearance or losing access to non-sensitive data.
• Easily mask big data on existing systems without the need for Hadoop, in-memory databases, or appliances.
• Assess the risk of re-identification and generalize quasi-identifiers for both anonymity and utility purposes.
• Safeguard your database clones with the help of powerful scripts executed through Actifio or Commvault. Ensure the utmost protection for your valuable data.
• You can easily verify compliance with privacy laws by using auto-created audit logs, job diagrams, and risk score reports.
• Incorporate masking into transformation, migration, replication, loading, federation, and analytic jobs.

<strong>#4. Accutive Data Discovery &amp; Masking&lt;/strong></h3>

p>Acc</p> <h3 class=”wp-block-heading”>utive Data Discovery &amp; Masking offers an intuitive interface that makes it easy to set up and start using quickly. It includes a range of visual indicators to help identify areas where sensitive information may be present, such as emails, social security numbers, phone numbers, and account numbers. This tool also provides support for various databases and cloud storage providers, making it easier to manage data across multiple sources.

Features:

• • • Data generators create new, artificial data to cover and replace sensitive information. This artificial data is like a mirror image of the existing values, making sure that security and utility are well taken care of.
    • With embedded, customizable rules, masking templates can adapt to your data model and apply multiple rules to different rows in the same table. It’s all about empowering you to have greater control and flexibility.
    • Embedded generators keep the original data intact while giving it a new and realistic twist. This is great for ensuring security, compliance, and usefulness.
    • The advanced bypass system allows you to mask data in your database by creating replacement values. Plus, it can handle terabytes of data with lightning-fast parallel processing.
    • The tool identifies custom expressions, allows you to specify languages, and adjusts pre- and postscripts for custom masking templates. It also helps in creating artificial data using correlated seed files.
    • It provides an efficient and high-performance masking technique.
    • It supports XML and CSV files from any major source, making it easy to work with different data formats.
    • Ensuring reliable masking across different databases and applications.

    <

/ul> <h3>ss=”wp-block-heading”>#5. Informatica Persistent Data Masking</strong&amp;gt;</strong></p>

Informatica Persistent Data Masking is an advanced data masking solution that empowers organizations to safeguard sensitive data in production, test, and development environments. It helps organizations protect their data from potential security threats.

<p>With its robust features and comprehensive capabilities, this cutting-edge solution ensures the highest level of data protection, confidentiality, and compliance. By obscuring sensitive information while preserving data integrity, Informatica Persistent Data Masking enables organizations to mitigate data privacy risks and maintain regulatory compliance effortlessly.

Features:</strong>

• It enhances data protection through

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itive data, as well as the pseudonymization of data for privacy compliance and analytics purposes.</li>
• Helps reduce the risk of data breaches in nonproduction environments.
• Produces higher-quality test data and streamlines development projects.
• Ensures compliance with data-privacy mandates and regulations.
• It provides an impenetrable shield for sensitive information like credit card numbers, addresses, and phone numbers. By generating realistic, de-identified data, it ensures secure sharing both within and outside your organization.

#6. IBM InfoSphere Optim Data Privacy

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IBM InfoSphere Optim Data Privacy offers a comprehensive set of capabilities designed to efficiently mask sensitive data in nonproduction environments, including development, testing, QA, and training. By employing a variety of transformation techniques, it replaces confidential information with realistic, fully functional masked data, ensuring not only contextual accuracy but also preserving the original data format.

This powerful solution enables organizations to safeguard sensitive data and comply with data protection regulations, mitigating the risk of unauthorized access and maintaining data privacy throughout the data lifecycle.</p>

<p>Features:

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  • Prepackaged data masking routines transform complex data elements while preserving their meaning. When integrated with the Information Governance Catalog, you gain access to 30 predefined data classifications and privacy rules.</li>

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• Optim Data Privacy enables organizations to enhance compliance with regulations like HIPAA, GLBA, DDP, PIPEDA, and more.

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• Optim Data Privacy seamlessly integrates with widely utilized applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel, and more. It provides support for renowned databases including IBM Db2®, IBM Information Management System, Postgres, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, and more.</li&gt; &lt;li>Compliance reports provide valuable insights into your risk exposure. These reports include the Masking Compliance Report, Data Masking Enforcement Report, and the Statistics by Masking Status, Data Store, and Database Management Systems Report.</li>

ss=”yoast-text-mark”>class=”wp-block-heading”><strong>#7. CA Test Data Manager</strong>

CA Test Data Manager (TDM) is a powerful masking tool that enables organizations to secure their sensitive data. With TDM, users can easily create masked copies of production databases to use in development and QA environments without compromising the protection of confidential information.

<strong>Features:

<ul&gt; <li>It helps you manage data privacy and compliance issues related to regulations and corporate mandates.

• The TDM Discovery and Profiling feature identifies personally identifiable information (PII) across multiple data sources.
• Combine synthetic data generation with coverage analysis to create the minimal dataset for comprehensive testing. You can also simulate future scenarios and unexpected results to test boundary conditions and prevent costly delays.
• Centrally store data as a reusable asset for quick access, cloning, and matching to specific tests. Avoid redundancy and maximize work value by storing rules and data models centrally.
• Easily generate virtual copies of test data whenever needed to provide each tester with their own set of data. This approach significantly reduces data volumes, test durations, and costs. It empowers development and testing teams to deliver better applications to the market faster and at a lower cost.

#8. K2View Data Masking</strong>

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K2View Ma

sking is a comprehensive solution that empowers organizations to safeguard their sensitive information, striking a perfect balance between protection and accessibility. With its cutting-edge capabilities, K2View Data Masking offers unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and performance, making it the ideal choice for organizations seeking robust masking solutions.

<p>By leveraging advanced techniques and algorithms, K2View Data Masking ensures that sensitive data remains secure, while enabling authorized users to seamlessly access and utilize it for legitimate purposes. With its intuitive interface and customizable features, K2View Masking provides organizations with a powerful tool to effectively manage and protect their data privacy, helping them stay compliant with regulatory requirements and build trust with their stakeholders.</p>

<strong>Features:

• • With its built-in PII discovery, it automatically scans all data sources, identifies PII/PHI data elements, and masks them based on pre-defined rules.
  • It scans metadata and database content to identify and classify sensitive data.
  • It sets up role-based (RBAC) and attribute-based (ABAC) access controls.
  • With its data masking rules, it generates reports to ensure full regulatory compliance.

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<strong>#9. DATPROF Privacy</strong>

<p>DATPROF Privacy provides a comprehensive and highly secure platform specifically designed for the rapid and precise anonymization of even the largest data volumes. With its cutting-edge technology, it not only masks test data but also generates realistic synthetic data, ensuring the utmost protection of sensitive customer information. By leveraging DATPROF Privacy, software teams can confidently utilize representative test data without compromising data privacy and security.

<strong>Features:

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• • You can easily mask data across multiple tables, systems, or (cloud) applications using deterministic masking or translation tables. This helps you keep your data in sync and maintain consistency across different systems.</li>
  • You can utilize over 50 built-in generators with various languages to generate fresh data or replace existing data. By combining synthetic data generation with database masking, you can ensure a compliant and representative test data set.</li&gt; &lt;li

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• The data is masked and generated directly within the database using our advanced bypass system. With parallel processing, you can easily mask and generate databases with terabytes of data.

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  FAQs

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  What are the Data Masking Techniques?

  <div class=”yoast-text-mark”>ass=”rank-math-answer”> <p>Some of the commonly used masking techniques can be employed to safeguard sensitive data within your datasets.
  class=”yoast-text-mark” />>1. Data Pseudonymization<br /&gt;2. Data Anonymization
  3. Lookup substitution<br />4. Encryption<br /&gt;5. Redaction
  6. Averaging
  7. Shuffling<br />8. Date Switching</p></p>