Informatica Corporation today announced the immediate availability of Informatica Dynamic Data Masking, the industry’s first dynamic data masking (DDM) solution. Informatica Dynamic Data Masking provides real-time, policy-driven obfuscation of sensitive data to address a wide range of common data security and privacy challenges without requiring any changes to database or application source code.
 

According to a recent Gartner report Technologies to Protect Applications and Data Against Insider Attacks, author, Joseph Feiman, research vice president and Gartner Fellow said, “DDM is an emerging market. Among its first adopters are financial organizations concerned with their client services personnel's access to sensitive data in production databases. Adoption is driven by these enterprises' realization that other technologies — such as IAM (Identity Access Management), SDM (Static Data Masking) and data encryption — cannot solve the problem.”
 

“The Ponemon Institute indicates that 90 percent of enterprises have experienced at least one data security breach in the last year. The cost of a breach averages $7.2 million and 41 percent of all cases involve insider negligence. Enterprises must go far beyond simply monitoring who is accessing sensitive data to comprehensively protecting the data from unauthorized access. Informatica’s comprehensive portfolio of data masking technologies, now including dynamic data masking, provides a scalable solution  to responsibly secure application and data warehouse data across the entire lifecycle,” said Adam Wilson, general manager, Information Lifecycle Management, Informatica. “With this new offering, Informatica provides a range of data masking solutions from irreversible obfuscation of data for development and testing to on-the-fly, user specific masking of production data.”
 

Informatica Dynamic Data Masking uses real-time data protection rules to provide finer grained control over the data that authorized users are allowed to see. These end-users, contract personnel, support teams, database administrators or developers can be given full access to production data, while ensuring access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other sensitive data can be completely, or partially de-identified.  This decreases the risk of data breach and ensures compliance with increasingly stringent data privacy regulations (PCI DSS, HIPAA, the HITECH Act, GLBA), without impacting user productivity, the underlying data, database structure, or query performance.
 

Informatica Dynamic Data Masking’s sophisticated, yet flexible protection rules greatly enhance the standard access controls provided through standard database security.  By enabling different masking algorithms to be applied dynamically to different sensitive data elements based on user privilege levels, customers have much more control over how information gets exposed to end users. Used in conjunction with data encryption to secure data at rest and with database activity monitoring to log and analyze utilization, dynamic data masking provides the perfect complement to ensure end-to-end security for production databases and applications.

Informatica Dynamic Data Masking empowers organizations to cost-effectively address current and future data privacy regulations through its comprehensive mix of real-time data anonymizing, blocking, auditing and alerting in a single environment. Customers benefit from the solution in the following ways:
• Comprehensive, real-time data protection techniques – Informatica Dynamic Data Masking employs a rich range of data masking techniques, including masking, scrambling, hashing, randomizing, blocking and hiding, which preserve original data characteristics and maintain data integrity.
• Rule-based access control (RBAC) – Enforces user access privileges based on ActiveDirectory grouping, LDAP, IAM, user roles and responsibilities when accessing personal and sensitive information across applications, reporting and development tools. 
• Non-intrusive to applications/databases – Informatica Dynamic Data Masking requires no changes to application code or source databases.
• Superior scalability and performance – Informatica Dynamic Data Masking is proven to scale to support hundreds of databases and thousands of concurrent users in a single enterprise-wide environment.
• Simple deployment – Packaged CRM, ERP, billing and custom business critical applications can be protected in a manner of days, with real-time data protection rules extended to any sensitive data in any format. Numerous pre-built masking rules are provided with the solution, and new rules are quickly created and applied via a simple graphical interface.
• Seamless integration with existing authentication software – Informatica Dynamic Data Masking integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP and IAM software to speed implementation and enhance data security by leveraging existing authorization and privilege models.

“Preventing data leakage and the need to comply with an ever increasing list of privacy regulations are of paramount importance to us in the telecommunications industry,” said Alon Ofek, CISO, Pelephone Communications. “We needed a solution that could quickly and transparently mask sensitive fields within our application screens and across our development tools with no changes to applications, databases, or tools themselves. Informatica Dynamic Data Masking enables us to proactively protect our data in real-time.”

Informatica Dynamic Data Masking is based on technology developed by ActiveBase, a pioneer in Dynamic Data Masking. ActiveBase was acquired by Informatica in July 2011. Gartner recognized ActiveBase as a “Cool Vendor” in 2010 for Application Security. 
 
Source: Informatica