In Part one, I introduced the idea of Test Data Management or TDM. TDM is not something unique to IT Applications in Cincinnati, Dayton or to Ohio. It’s something that will need to be addressed nationwide. With more and more government regulations and data privacy concerns, it will be more and more important to not only manage production data, but also test data used for quality assurance as well.
One of the aspects of good TDM is for the obfuscation (sometimes referred to as de-identification or masking) of data values from a production database in order to make the test instances “safe”. One of the challenges is preserving data distributions and referential integrity–even across distributed database systems. This is particularly important in the healthcare and financial industries where PHI (Personal Health Information), social security numbers or banking information could get exposed.
Another aspect is the challenge of maintaining security around the test databases themselves. Many companies have tight security around production data, but next to none around test and developer data. Often this data is just a copy of production data that is not masked in any way. According to a Ponemon Institute study, data breach incidents cost U.S. companies $202 per compromised customer record in 2008, that is compared to $197 in 2007. With the cases studied a range of 4,200 to 113,000 records that were affected.
Do any of you reading this have a little twinge in your stomach? Can’t anything be easy anymore? Maybe some RX is in order. That was EASY!!!!
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