Data Masking is the answer to a Data breach

What Is Data Masking?

Data masking is a technique that protects personal data to ensure that the data cannot relate to a specific person. There are many ways to mask your data, for example, word or character replacement, character shuffling and word encryption. The approach you choose to mask your data depends on the nature of the data you want to hide. The end goal of data masking is to guard sensitive data while implementing a functional alternative when real information is not required, such as user training, sales demos, or software trial.

Why Is Data Masking Important?

According to stats, the rate of data breaches is growing rapidly every year compared to midyear of 2018, where the number of reported breaches was up by 54% in 2019. As IT industry leaders understand, data is the answer to building data-driven applications and software and unlocking ambitious advantages. It has become increasingly critical to grant reliable access to data that ripples across an organization to innovate faster and at scale without endangering its privacy and safety. Hence, it has now become a necessity for various organizations to update their data security systems.
Masking techniques have numerous benefits, but the major purpose for organizations to begin adapting to this technology is to overcome data security vulnerability. Data masking also reduces the chances of personal data disclosure in compliance with data privacy laws. Using the best data masking methods, countless organizations have now migrated data faster to those who require it.

Which Type of Data Needs Data Masking

• Personally identifiable information (PII): Any data could be employed in order to distinguish any specific person. For instance, last name, social security number, or identification documents such as driver’s license number and passport number.
• Protected health information (PHI): PHI combines demographic data, medical histories, test and laboratory results, mental health conditions, insurance data, and other information collected by a healthcare professional to recognize proper care.
• Payment card information (PCI-DSS): All organizations need to follow an information security prototype working on branded credit cards from the important card schemes.
• Intellectual property (IP): Intellectual property refers to legal rights that give inventors protection for unique works, inventions, or the presence of products, creative results, scientific developments, and so on.

How Data Masking Prevents Data Breach

We can combine data Masking technology with other data protection techniques, for example, encryption, database activity monitoring (DAM), and security information and event management (SIEM), collectively implementing extensive data privacy protection. Here are some points to show how data masking is imperative for numerous organizations to prevent data breaches:

• We can use data masking to prevent many critical threats surrounding an organization, such as information loss, insider threats, data exfiltration or account compromise, and weak interfaces with third-party operations.
• It reduces jeopardies linked with data and cloud adoption.
• It makes data worthless to a hacker while keeping many of its original functional features.
• It allows us to share data with approved users without disclosing production data and details.
• It is widely adopted for data sanitization. For example, the traditional file deletion method still leaves data traces in storage media, while sanitization replaces the former values with masked ones.

Data Masking with Blue Bricks

Blue Bricks is a security solution that implements data masking and encryption capabilities, allowing you to prevent your company’s sensitive data, even if somehow extracted. Blue Brick’s data security solution provides comprehensive data masking solutions to protect your data wherever it lives (on-premises, in the cloud, and in hybrid environments).