Data security and protection has become an important aspect of business management. There is always the risk of data breach from outside the origination as well as from within. Without proper data security, it is quite hard for businesses to stay alive in the digital world.
There is where Data Masking comes into play. It helps you protect your sensitive business data from potential data breaches and hijacking attempts.
Let’s dig in a little deeper and learn about the features and benefits that Data Masking has to offer.
What is Data Masking?
Data Masking is a technique for masking or hiding the personally identifiable data with fake or modified content to protect it from unauthorized access. This data protection technique ensures that only those people who need to see the data, only they have access to it when needed. With data masking, the actual values are changed with fake data values to obfuscate the original data, thus rendering its useless for a 3rd Party.
Data Masking has two types
Static Data Masking: Static Data Masking permanently replaces the actual data when it is sitting in the database. This is the data that is not being using in a transaction at the moment.
Dynamic Data Masking: This type of masking hides the production data when a data request is made. Dynamic Data Masking ensures that the original data that is being fetched to process the request remains intact.
Benefits of Data Masking
1. Protection of Confidential Data
Your confidential business data is going to need to be passed around in the origination for different operations. If you make it all public and accessible by everyone, it will greatly undermine its integrity. With Data Masking, you can hide the actual data and share it in a safe and secure way with the parties that are supposed to use the data. This will keep your data anonymous while ensuring that all the business operations go in a smooth way. The diffrent technologies inclduing the binary system and image to base64 are also the secure way to share data safely.
2. Saves your Data from Inside Data Breaches
There is not just the risk of outside breaches with the business data, insiders with malicious intents can also compromise the integrity of sensitive business information. This happens when you are dealing with an angry employee in most cases. By setting up data masking mechanisms, you ensure that no one other than the people concerned have access to the data.
3. Personalized Data Access for Different Business Operations
Data Masking allows companies to share data in a controlled way. By setting up different tier levels with encryptions, you ensure that only the authorized personnel have access to confidential business data.
Not all your business operations need the same level of access to personal business data. You can set up masking encryptions to restrict the level of access that you give to different business units. This scientifically reduces the data risks in terms of inside breaches.
4. Multiple Masking Techniques to Choose From
There are a lot of masking techniques that can be utilized to mask your data. Techniques like substitution, shuffling and blurring are the most commonly used ones. All these techniques use different masking levels and you need to choose the one that suits your business operations the best.
For example, with shuffling data masking technique, the values are moved vertically or horizontally across a data column.
5. Cost-Effective Encryption Method
Data Masking is generally a bit less expensive and less complicated than other data encryption tasks. You are not setting up separate access levels per se, you are manipulating data using data masking techniques and you share let’s say, the key with authorized personnel. These people that you want to share the data with, then would be able to decrypt and use it as per the operation requirement.
Final Words
Data Masking is a powerful data security solution which is being heavily used to maximize the database security. Although there are other techniques available as well, Snowflake Data Masking stands at the top in terms of feasibility as well as implementation. It is an essential security measure that companies need to invest in to ensure the integrity of their confidential data. Make sure Invest in a Data Masking system for your business to save your data from insider and outsider threats.
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