Data privacy regulations—coupled with the desire to protect sensitive data—impose requirements on organizations to protect production data. Since many organizations rely on production data as a source for test data, techniques are needed to mask sensitive data elements from unauthorized viewing.
A popular technique for protecting sensitive data is data masking, a method that creates data that is structurally similar to production data but that is not the same as the actual data. After data is masked, it can be used by application systems the same way as the actual, production data. But protected, sensitive data values are not exposed for all to see.
