Data Masking 2015
Date:
By: Philip Howard
Classification: Market Update
Since we published our Market Report on data masking in 2013 the market has started to diverge. Data masking originally emerged as a complement to test data management, to protect sensitive data from unauthorised eyes (assuming that you were not using synthetic test data generation). However, it has always been, in essence, a security technology.
What has been happening in the market is that some vendors – not all – have been transitioning their offerings from security for non-production to production data and this is taking them squarely into the security sector. Moreover, while our previous report distinguished between vendors offering static masking (for non-production data) and dynamic masking (for production data), a number of suppliers are now going further than this with the introduction of products that, while leveraging these masking techniques, are squarely in the security space. This is known as data-centric security and the idea is that, alongside perimeter security, what is important is to protect your data assets: if a security breach occurs and data records are stolen this has no value if sensitive data cannot be read.
Bloor Research has surveyed and evaluated data masking products from the leading vendors and this Market Report represents a brief overview of our results.