Protecting your organisation’s data is more important than ever before, particularly if you are in a regulated industry such as banking or healthcare. One of the most difficult aspects of testing solutions within businesses is how the test data is handled, and in many cases, this means it is conveniently overlooked. With testing being an important factor in launching new software that performs well, it’s in the best interest of your organisation to protect data from unauthorised access and ensure effective test data management is in place.
Having a much more robust test data strategy in place can help your business to avoid any surprises once your system or application goes live, delivering confidence in your quality engineering and testing practices. So, how do you achieve this and protect data from unauthorised use, while adhering to regulations?
Choosing the right data set type
Choosing your test data is a huge decision; choose the wrong data set type and you could land your business in hot water, particularly if you deal with sensitive data. In any testing environment, production data would be the best choice but GDPR stipulates this is no longer acceptable. Using production data is too great a risk for your business and you could be held liable for fines and penalties if that data was lost or landed in the wrong hands.
With that in mind, it’s important instead to use test data that is as close to production as possible, resulting in a realistic testing environment. Test data management is key here to ensure a process of obfuscating or generating synthetic data.
Creating obfuscated or synthetic data
Managed test data can help to create test environments on demand, with synthetic data able to deliver a highly repeatable solution. In turn, this can enhance the speed of your business’ testing turnaround time. Manual test preparation can take up to 30% of the testing time, which can prevent your organisation from achieving a continuous deployment or DevOps model.
Obfuscated or synthetic test data can allow you to test on demand to achieve faster and cost-efficient delivery, without risking the integrity of any sensitive data. Having an automated method to support your test data management can help you take this to the next level.
Protect your data with iData
iData offers an automated approach to supporting your test data management for both obfuscation and synthetic data. Today’s regulatory requirements have made it incredibly important to use production-like data without exposing sensitive information. An automated test data management solution like iDataMaker can give you the chance to further your data quality assurance discovery, without falling foul of these regulations.
Offering tighter controls of your test data, iDataMaker can be instrumental in highly sensitive environments, and is much quicker than manually generating test data. In turn, having this kind of sophisticated test data management solution will ensure high quality software that performs well when deployed.
Removing human error as well as offering reliable and continuous testing, you can achieve a complete understanding of your software before it is released. Get in touch to find out more about how iDataMaker could empower your ability to protect sensitive data within your organisation.
