WASHINGTON, Nov. 3, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- INFORMATICA WORLD 2010 -- Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA), the world's number one independent leader in data integration software, today announced significant new updates for Informatica Data Masking. Interest in data masking has increased dramatically as more organizations recognize the vast exposure to risk when personal, health and business data is used in application development and testing environments.
More than 150 customers like Citigroup, Deutsche Telekom and USPS are now gaining value from Informatica Data Masking to help reduce the risk of security, privacy and compliance violations that can lead to customer outrage and defection, shareholder dissatisfaction and costly regulatory and legal action.
The use of actual production data, when developing and testing new applications, is extremely widespread – and introduces tremendous risk. According to new research by Ponemon Institute, 84 percent of surveyed organizations use customer data for test and development purposes, yet 45 percent still do not protect this real data, thus rendering that data vulnerable to misuse by careless or malicious individuals. With test and development efforts increasingly outsourced or conducted offshore, the risks around sensitive data are further elevated.
"According to the Enterprise Strategy Group research, 51% of security professionals believe that more than half of their organization's total data capacity could be classified as confidential," said Brian Babineau, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "As companies realize the privacy-related compliance and governance risk of using this data in application test and development environments, they have no choice but to take corrective action by investing in solutions such as data masking. Fortunately, some organizations that are accelerating their application development cycles are being more proactive and investing in test data management automation solution with masking capabilities to improve process efficiencies and mitigate risk at the same time."
Informatica Data Masking helps safeguard sensitive, private or confidential data by masking it in-flight or in-place. As a result, fully functional, real-world data sets can be used safely in development, test and other non-production environments, as well as in outsourcing or offshore environments. Private data is de-identified using techniques and algorithms that obfuscate the original data, and the masked data retains its original format and properties so that applications continue to function properly as IT teams engage in development and test activities.
"Data masking has emerged as the lynchpin of data security in non-production environments," said James Duffy, Senior Manager, Capgemini. "As Capgemini's alliance partner, Informatica provides the flexible technology underpinning for our proven masking methodology. Capgemini clients benefit from optimal protection of their data in non-production environments, and from the assurance that their masked data remains representative of the original production data with full referential integrity."
New and Enhanced Capabilities
- Automated discovery of sensitive data to analyze disparate source systems and help identify confidential information based on key words, patterns, or associated metadata.
- Introduction of privacy policies allows masking rules to be assigned to specific types of information (credit card, social security number, etc.) and then applied consistently across any number of databases.
- Pre-packaged "policy sets" for specific regulatory statutes (HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), PCI (Payment Card Industry)) accelerate implementation and overall compliance.
- Integrated data subsetting, ensures rapid generation of "lean" copies of production as part of the data masking process.
- Built on the market leading data integration platform, Informatica 9, Informatica Data Masking provides enterprise-grade scalability and performance as well as universal connectivity to source and target systems.
- Flexible plug-in architecture allows users to extend Informatica's pre-defined set of masking algorithms and define their own masking transformations, sharing these across projects or across companies through the Informatica Marketplace.
- Self-service interface allows analysts to provision and refresh secure copies or subsets of production, without requiring help from a DBA or administrator.
"Over the past decade, customers have spent the majority of their IT security budget on locking down their networks and production systems. Now they are starting to realize their greatest risk for data breach is in their development, testing, and training environments, said Adam Wilson, general manager, Application Information Lifecycle Management, Informatica. "As these non-production environments proliferate and the sensitive data in them gets exposed to a broader array of internal employees, contractors and outsourcers, the associated risk of a data spill goes up dramatically. To mitigate this risk and support compliance with data privacy regulations, customers are increasingly turning to Informatica to comprehensively and efficiently de-identify sensitive data for non-production use."
Tweet This: Customers Embracing @InformaticaCorp Data Masking to Protect Against Data Security Violations #ILM #IW2010
About Informatica
Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA) is the world's number one independent leader in data integration software. The Informatica Platform provides corporations with a comprehensive, unified, open and economical approach to lower IT costs and gain competitive advantage from their information assets. More than 4,200 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to access, integrate and trust their information assets held in the traditional enterprise and in the internet cloud. For more information, call +1 650-385-5000 (1-800-653-3871 in the U.S.), or visit . Connect with Informatica at , and .
Note: Informatica, Informatica Platform, Informatica ILM and PowerCenter are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.
CONTACT: Informatica Corporation Deborah Wiltshire +1 650 385 5360 mobile/+1 650 862 8186 dwiltshire@informatica.com Ogilvy PR David Friedman +1 303 634 2674 infaopr@ogilvypr.com