Data breaches worldwide expose millions of people’s sensitive data each year, causing many business organizations to lose millions. In fact, in 2021, the average cost of a data breach so far is $4.24 million. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is the costliest type of data among all the compromised data types.
Consequently, data protection has become the top priority of many organizations. That’s why data masking has become an essential technique many businesses need to protect their sensitive data.
What is data masking?
Data masking, also known as data obfuscation, hides the actual data using modified content like characters or numbers.
The main objective of data masking is creating an alternate version of data that cannot be easily identifiable or reverse engineered, protecting data classified as sensitive. Importantly, the data will be consistent across multiple databases, and the usability will remain unchanged.
There are many types of data that you can protect using masking, but common data types ripe for data masking include:
- PII: Personally identifiable information
- PHI: Protected health information
- PCI-DSS: Payment card information
- ITAR: Intellectual property
Data masking generally applies to non-production environments, such as software development and testing, user training, etc.—areas that do not need actual data. You can use various techniques to mask which we will discuss in the following sections of this article.
(Check out our big data & data security explainers.)
Importance of data masking
Data masking is important to companies in several ways:
- Helps companies to stay compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by eliminating the risk of sensitive data exposure. Because of this, data masking offers a competitive advantage for many organizations.
- Makes data useless for cyberattackers while preserving its usability and consistency.
- Reduces risks associated with sharing the data with integrated third-party applications and cloud migrations.
- Avoids risks associated with outsourcing any project. Because most organizations merely rely on trust when dealing with outsourced persons, masking prevents data from being misused or stolen.
