In today’s digital world, protecting sensitive data has become more important than ever. Data privacy concerns continue to rise, and unintended data access threats can be disastrous for organizations, leading to financial losses, reputational damage, and potential regulatory violations. But while securing data is critical, companies also need to leverage data for innovation and decision-making. This tension between ensuring data privacy and maintaining data utility is where solutions like DataMasque come in.
Balancing Data Privacy and Utility in a Complex Environment
With regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 in place, organizations are under pressure to safeguard sensitive data while still using it effectively for business operations. However, as businesses move toward cloud environments like AWS, the challenge increases. During system testing or development, organizations often use customer data, which can create significant risks, especially in less secure environments.
Traditional approaches, such as handcrafting data, can reduce its quality and utility, and manual de-identification may leave data vulnerable to reverse-engineering. But there is a better solution—DataMasque.
DataMasque: A Comprehensive Solution for Data Privacy and Utility
DataMasque provides a powerful data masking solution that enables businesses to strike the right balance between data privacy and utility. By replacing real data with synthetic values that mimic the original data, DataMasque ensures that production-quality data can be used for development, testing, and analytics without compromising compliance or risking unintended data access.
DataMasque integrates seamlessly with AWS services, allowing businesses to innovate freely while ensuring data protection. It provides enterprise-grade automated masking for large databases, file stores, and specialized templates for protecting sensitive data like Oracle Siebel or FHIR.
Customer Use Cases
Here are a few ways that businesses are using DataMasque to meet their data privacy and utility needs:
- Cloud Migration to AWS: Organizations moving to AWS can use DataMasque to mask sensitive data before third-party partners access it, ensuring data remains protected. Once the migration is complete, the masking process integrates directly into their data provisioning pipelines. DataMasque’s ease of use, lightweight integration, and out-of-box compliance artifacts make it an ideal solution for AWS users.
- Enabling Development and Test Teams: Development and testing teams often require access to production-quality data but without exposure to sensitive information. DataMasque helps by masking Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other sensitive data. This allows teams to work with data that mirrors real-world scenarios without compromising security or creating unrealistic datasets.
Joseph Landucci, Director of Technology Management at Best Western, shared his experience:
“This will provide improved data and help us develop faster, so we’ll be able to reduce time-to-market for new products and features. For instance, we can develop offerings that add value to the business and increase revenue, such as creating new marketing products.”
- Powering Business Intelligence: Many organizations have a wealth of data that cannot be fully utilized due to its sensitivity. DataMasque solves this problem by maintaining the consistency, distribution, and numerical fidelity of de-identified data, so businesses can derive valuable insights without risking data privacy.
- Supporting AI and Machine Learning: Sensitive customer data, such as PII, financial records, or healthcare data, is often required for training AI and machine learning models. However, using real data comes with the risk of data leakage and model memorization. DataMasque helps by protecting this data while preserving the necessary statistical patterns and relationships needed for model training.
How DataMasque Works
To start addressing the risk of data exposure, DataMasque first discovers sensitive data like PII across databases and files. The built-in data discovery functionality includes both metadata keyword search and in-data patterns for identifying and classifying sensitive information.
DataMasque goes beyond basic masking by ensuring data consistency and integrity. It supports the masking of primary and unique keys and automatically maintains referential integrity across foreign keys. This ensures that masked data stays consistent across all databases, files, and tables.
A Fully Automated Data Masking Pipeline
DataMasque’s API-first architecture integrates smoothly with existing Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) systems. The solution can automate the entire data provisioning pipeline, making it simple and secure to mask data across multiple systems. Additionally, DataMasque supports irreversible masking using cryptographically secure SHA-512 salted hash, further strengthening data protection.
Seamless Integration with AWS
DataMasque integrates effortlessly with various AWS services, including Amazon S3, AWS HealthLake, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS Secrets Manager, and AWS Step Functions. This allows businesses to leverage the full potential of AWS while keeping their data protected. The core of DataMasque’s platform is its powerful discovery and masking engine, which applies advanced algorithms to replace real data with synthetic but realistic values.
By enabling organizations to use high-quality, masked data, DataMasque provides a valuable and safe alternative for development, testing, and analytics teams to work with production-like data, without compromising data privacy.
About DataMasque
As an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, DataMasque has earned recognition for its innovative approach to data protection. The company is also a Security Competency Partner and the exclusive “de-identification” partner for AWS HealthLake. With solutions available on the AWS Marketplace, DataMasque is helping businesses navigate the complex landscape of data privacy regulations while unlocking the full potential of their data.
DataMasque’s powerful data masking capabilities, combined with the security and scalability of AWS services, allow organizations to innovate while maintaining the highest data protection standards.
Interested in how DataMasque can help you protect sensitive data while maintaining its utility? You can try it today with a free trial available on the AWS Marketplace.
Also Read: MeitY Startup Hub Launches Innovation Challenge to Build Open-Source Consent Systems
