9 Best Data Masking Tools for Anonymity and Security

You can protect your business’s and customers’ sensitive data via pseudonymization, anonymization, and de-identification using these best data masking tools.

In digital and data-centric businesses, there are various phases when third-party access your customer or business data. You can not just omit the data from reports or user displays. Also, you can not give out the original data too. Here, data masking plays an important role in protecting real data by replacing the displayed data with unrealistic data. 

Your employees, vendors, and clients can easily handle those datasets without knowing the real thing, like the business’s profit margin from certain sales or customers’ credit card details. Find below the list of a few data masking tools handpicked for you. 

Why Is Data Masking Essential? 

Here is why successful and vigilant organizations use data masking:

• Eliminate the risk of data theft or infiltration when uploading data to the cloud.
• Prevent a competitor from learning your business tactics like profit margin, user volume, etc.
• Data masking empowers you to stop the misuse or unsolicited use of customer data by employees, contractors, or vendors.
• You can freely share masked data with interns, developers, designers, content creators, and the public for business reasons.

How to Do Data Masking?

Find below the ways that businesses adopt when performing data masking: 

#1. Pseudonymization 

It prevents user identification by combining various pieces of data. You must remove personally identifiable data and replace those with unrelated names, dates of birth, etc.

#2. Data Shuffling and Substitution

In this process, you substitute and shuffle data using stock data like stock names from the internet, stock SSNs, etc. While the dataset still looks realistic and useful, attackers can not use the data to harm your business. 

#3. Show a Null Value

You can program your databases, Excel sheets, website data tables, cloud data, etc., so the datasets show a Null text when an unauthorized person accesses the data.

#4. Changing the Original Values

Here, you can simply apply mathematical operators like multiplication, division, subtraction, etc., to change numerical values using a logical pattern. You must choose a tough pattern so others can not decipher the original values. It is challenging to implement such patterns yourself, so you need to use any of the tools mentioned in this article.  

Features to Look For in a Data Masking Tool

When getting a data masking tool, emphasize the following must-have features: 

• International standard-based tools that automatically mask data according to conventions like HIPAA, CCPA, GDPR, etc.
• The tool should automatically seek out personally identifiable and sensitive data from a data set and apply a pre-configured data masking strategy.
• A perfect data masking tool should allow you to connect various data sources like open datasets and premium sources.
• There should be tough ciphering algorithms so that no one can reverse engineer the masked data to its original values except for the tool used for data masking.
• It should offer business-specific test data, fictitious but realistic data, etc., instead of original column headers, row headers, values, etc. Thus, the end product will be good for research and development purposes.
• Masked data should not be useful to competitors or hackers.  

Explore the data masking tools that your business should check out right now: 

Delphix

Delphix is a data masking and compliance solution that can automatically locate sensitive information and mask those. Whether it is the customer name, email address, or credit card number, it can find 30 types of critical data from different sources, such as relational databases and files.

The solution offers over 50 out-of-the-box profile sets defining custom profiling expressions. To run its masking algorithms, you do not need to know to code. It can retain referential integrity within and across the data sources while generating realistic values. Delphix also allows you to easily customize its algorithm frameworks; if needed, you can define new algorithms.

Masked data quality is preserved in fully functional status so you can use it for development, testing, and analysis. Companies that need to comply with standards and regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA can use this platform for data tokenization and irreversible masking. Moreover, it lets you define and apply consistent masking policies to eliminate the risks across non-production environments.

K2View

If you are looking for a data masking tool to protect your large volume of sensitive data, K2View is the right solution for you. It implements a data product approach that reduces the implementation time and costs while eliminating enterprise-level complexities. 

Anonymizing the sensitive individual entity data in transit protects PII data from being compromised and preserves the relational consistency of masked data. This solution also helps you comply with data privacy standards, including GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, HIPAA, LGPD, and PCI DSS. 

It uses auto-discovery and data catalog features for classifying and mapping sensitive data. You can also perform a granular-level search in terms of database files and metadata. K2View also allows you to apply hundreds of out-of-the-box masking functions, such as substitution, randomizing, shuffling, scrambling, switching, nulling-out, and redaction.

In addition, it supports integration with data sources or technology, whether they are located on-premise or in the cloud. You can connect this solution to relational databases, legacy systems, NoSQL, XML docs, message queues, and flat files to mask data with referential integrity.

Accutive

Accutive offers a useful range of robust data masking tools that not only keep your critical data secure but also retain it viable for different business-critical functions. This on-premises solution ensures that masked information looks like real information by retaining the made-up values of data fields and properties across all data sources.

It supports data migration from sources including Oracle, DB2, SQLServer, XML, MySQL, and flat files to selected destinations. You can also store the masked data in MySQL, SQLServer, PostgreSQL, and other databases. This cross-platform software can be used in Linux, Unix, Windows, and different cloud services.

Accutive also offers a highly-functional dashboard to see the latest activity, active connections, graphic data masking results, and task progress. Detailed reporting, performance insights, integrated account management, login directory, and multi-factor authentication compatibility are some other mentionable features of this solution.

Informatica

With Informatica cloud data masking, you can easily safeguard your client data privacy. It assists you in meeting organizational compliance objectives of safe data handling and data security governance. You can use it to anonymize and de-identify sensitive data for safely using the data for testing, development, data analytics, supply chains, and customer experience programs.

This platform lets you have flexible, data-centric security across all complex environments your organization uses. You can use this solution to protect data in cloud-native privacy and data governance. While doing all these, Informatica maintains data context and referential integrity for heightened security and compliance-proof use.

It masks all the personal data, including users, locations, birthdates, and roles, from a large volume of data from different locations and databases. The solution supports broad connectivity across databases, applications, and mainframes. It also reduces the risk of data loss or data misuse. 

Hush-Hush 

For modern-day businesses, it is challenging to comply with public and regulatory privacy requirements. However, you have a Hush-Hush solution to help you with PII data masking. You can use this software to locate sensitive data from your organizational database and classify those for anonymization. 

During data masking, it complies with GDPR, HIPAA / HITECH, CCPA, and GLBA standards. Hush-Hush even uses rule-based components for comprehensive configuration and secure data anonymization. It also provides out-of-the-box solutions to mask direct and indirect identifiers using fixed and generic algorithms. 

Moreover, the solution can run on-premise and in the cloud. You can also integrate it with native SQL server SSIS, Biztalk, and code using API. With this solution, you can perform data anonymization jobs on a schedule or an ad-hoc basis. It also builds audit trail reports for different regulatory compliances like GDPR, CCPA, and HITECH.

dataZense

Do you want to keep your data secure and compliant? Choose dataZense, the data masking solution for sensitive data protection. The tools provided by this platform help you with data profiling, data loss prevention, remediation, and data governance. It can profile structured and unstructured data, so you do not have to worry about the data sources.

The solution performs column-level data profiling to effortlessly identify PII and sensitive data from the database. There is also the Business Validation Process that assists with reviewing and approving data as sensitive. dataZense also prevents unauthorized data access or misuse with data masking, scrambling, or encryption.

This cloud-based platform can be accessed from anywhere at your convenient time. It also supports GDPR, CCPA, OIOO, and other privacy laws and standards. This scalable platform ensures continued protection but allows you to pay only for masked data.

With dataZense PII data discovery tools, organizations can protect sensitive information and comply with regulations. 

DataVeil

DataVeil offers two powerful data masking tools named DataVeil and FileMasker. The first tool masks sensitive data in different SQL databases, while the latter permanently masks data from files. These tools mask all the sensitive data like names, addresses, contact numbers, and credit card numbers with fictitious information that will sound real. 

Since masking transforms the data into something non-sensitive, organizations can use that for testing, development, training, outsourcing, data analysis, and support. Since data security and privacy laws worldwide are becoming more rigorous, you can use this solution to comply with GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI. 

While masking, it maintains the statistical and syntactical properties of originally sourced data by providing meaningful and relevant masked data. It even preserves the format of individual characters present in a sensitive value, such as alphabet, number, and special character. Thus, you can use the data without worrying about testing, development, data analysis, training, support, and outsourcing.

Immuta

When it comes to dynamic data masking and privacy controls, Immuta could be your ideal choice. During query time, it hides sensitive values through modification without changing the original data. In its security and privacy control suite, you can instruct an attribute-based access control policy. For policy language, you can either choose to write in code or plain language.

It also offers more than 60 pre-built security and privacy controls from which you can select any to protect sensitive data. You can also dynamically apply these controls at query time for different types of data masking, including anonymization, pseudonymization, minimization, and obfuscation. 

These dynamic policies allow you to instantly access the authorized data from any notebook, BI tool, or workbench. On Immuta, you can automate the process of access restrictions with different conditions, like user demography, time-based windows, adjacent cell data, or reference table data. 

Above all, it reduces the engineering burden and lets you access the masked data instantly.  This software also reduces the risk of data breaches, protects your organizational reputation, lets you share data securely, and increases your team’s productivity.

IRI FieldShield

Are you worried about managing your large volume of data at risk? IRI FieldShield is a reliable data masking solution for all kinds of organizations. Companies that use this software can perform central PII classification, locate data from any global location and mask the data automatically.

It can also maintain referential integrity when it uses encryption, pseudonymization, redaction, and approaches for production and test environments. You can seamlessly anonymize the data under GDPR, CIPSEA, HIPAA, DPA, PCI, FERPA, GLBA, POPI, and other regulations. 

IRI FieldShield supports masking data generated in every source, including relational databases, NoSQL databases, Flat Files, Mainframes, Excel spreadsheets, index files, URLs, semi-structured files, and unstructured files. Its features can be utilized for profiling and de-identifying data at rest and securing data in motion. If interested, you can book a live demo to see how it works.

Final Words

You should not ignore the data redaction or encryption requirement of various international and local data privacy and security standards.

Masking original business and user data helps you to comply with various laws like GDPR, HIPAA, etc. So these are the reliable and popular data masking tools you can use in your data-centric business operations. 

Next, check out cloud data protection platforms to keep your data nimble and safe.