About the client
The customer is a Washington-based financial institution and the fourth-largest not-for-profit financial cooperative in the United States, managing assets exceeding $17 billion and serving more than one million members. As a digitally driven organization, they operate over 40 cashless branches, complemented by a select number of traditional branch locations.
Client challenges
The customer faced challenges in establishing an agile testing infrastructure while maintaining the highest data privacy and security standards. To address this, they sought a secure DevOps solution that could fulfill specific requirements:
- Sensitive Data Discovery: They required a solution that could identify sensitive data values across all its environments and automating the consistent masking of those values.
- Masking Consistency and Repeatability: Applications must be consistently masked, ensuring uniform functionality with masked and unmasked data. The solution also needed to preserve referential integrity across masked flat files and databases.
- Out-of-the-Box Masking Templates: The team sought a straightforward solution with pre-set rules for immediate use.
- Breadth of Supported Databases and Flat Files: They needed a solution capable of masking Oracle, SQL Server, and over 100 flat files across nine critical applications, including CRM, loan originations, and member portal systems.
- Reporting and Auditing of Masked Data: The credit union needed to track masked data across sources over time, verifying that masked environments remained free from unmasked confidential data.
Solution
- Perforce Delphix was leveraged to consistently mask data across relational database platforms and flat files, even as data changes over time. The referential integrity of masked data within and across databases and files was maintained.
- Perforce Delphix‘s integrated data profiling capabilities were employed to tackle the initial and vital phase in safeguarding sensitive data: identifying the areas where the risk is present.
- Hybrid cloud architecture and Perforce Delphix were used to maintain synchronization between their on-premise and cloud environments.
- The consistent gathering of data from production sources, masking, and seamless replication of the data to AWS ensured access to fresh and secure data in the cloud. This allowed them to effortlessly provide new virtual data copies to a team of over 200 developers within minutes.
Benefits
- Data masking implementation in less than six weeks shortened the application deployment process and enhanced overall data governance.
- Integrated data virtualization enhanced the speed of masked data distribution, reduced data duplication, and facilitated real-time access to support various business needs.
- Achieved internal compliance requirements ahead of schedule which heightened security measures, risk mitigation, and ensured operational continuity.
- A Masking Center of Excellence integrated with Data Virtualization resulted in many improvements including: efficient data masking, consistent standards, rapid provisioning of masked data, centralized control, optimized resource utilization, enhanced collaboration, accelerated development cycles, and reduced risk of data exposure.