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Data Masking in Informatica: What It Is, Why You Need It and How to Use It

Data Masking in Informatica: What It Is, Why You Need It and How to Use It

Pedro Araez1869 22-Mar-2022

For years, Informatica has been considered the gold standard for data masking. However, with recent updates to the product, it can now help you implement data masking in ways you never imagined.

How does your company know if it is doing a good job? Data analytics, the practice of analyzing data to make decisions, has been used for years by organizations of all sizes. But many companies still use rudimentary tools that mask the true information, making it difficult for businesses to get a clear picture of how they’re performing. In this post, we’ll take a look at data masking in Informatica, explain what it is, why you need it, and how to use it.

In this post, I’ll show you why data masking is an absolute must for every BI (Business Intelligence) analyst and how to implement it in Informatica.

1. Data Masking in Informatica: What It Is

Data masking in Informatica is a term that describes the ability of Informatica to replace real data with a fictional one in order to hide sensitive information. Delphix Data masking is used to secure confidential and trade secret data, and can also be used to protect personally identifiable information (PII) that may be collected and stored by organizations. There are many different kinds of data masking available in Informatica, and you must be careful about which is being used. If the correct masking is not selected for your specific business scenario, the masking process could actually be putting the confidential information at risk of exposure.

2. Data Masking in Informatica: Why You Need It

Informatica is the leading data masking solution, and it can help your organization improve data quality and security while providing a rich set of analytics and reporting capabilities. However, when used properly, data masking is a powerful and cost-effective tool for any business that processes sensitive data. But how do you know if you need it? What’s the difference between masking data versus sanitizing it? And where can you start?

Data masking is a process that helps organizations to transform sensitive data into non-sensitive or less sensitive data. When organizations mask data, they try to make sure that the original data stays intact, but changes are made so that the masked data cannot be easily linked back to the original data. Masking data usually involves the use of software tools that can change the data in a way that makes it appear to be a different value. For instance, the date or phone number can be changed to something like “999-9999.” The goal of data masking is to help an organization get the most out of its data by ensuring that it meets its data security requirements while not impacting the business. It is important to understand that not all organizations need to use masking tools. Some organizations may prefer to sanitize data.

Data masking helps to protect your company's data and keeps it secure by changing it into another format. It does this by either removing or replacing sensitive information. This can help to prevent data loss and keep sensitive information private. You can also use data masking to prevent unauthorized users from accessing information. This can help to prevent hackers from accessing data in your company and stop them from stealing it.

3. Data Masking in Informatica: How to Use It

In the past, data masking was only done by hand or manually. Data Masking in Informatica allows us to automate this process. Data Masking in Informatica has three major functions. Firstly, it converts the data into a standard format that is accepted by all of your databases. This is done by extracting the fields from the raw data and populating them in a specific format. The second step is to make sure that all the data is in the same format by masking it out and converting any special characters to a format that can be read by your database. Lastly, you can combine the data to make it more specific.

4. Data Masking in Informatica: A Practical Example

For example, consider the scenario where a client company is going to launch a new website but needs to wait until the new website is complete before they can promote it online. This could mean waiting months or even years before they are able to market their products or services. In this case, we’d need to use data masking to hide the fact that there is a brand new website. By using data masking, we can disguise the fact that this is a new site as long as it’s not promoting the same products as the old website. This means we can get the client company to launch the new website, and then in the meantime, have them market their products and services on the old site.

5. Data Masking and the Informatica Workflow

While there are some differences in how we define these types of workflow, the most important ones are in what they’re called. A data mask defines the format of the data being passed from one system to another. In other words, it defines the data type and the fields that contain the data, whether it's a number, text string, etc. A workflow describes a process that consists of several steps that need to be executed in a specific order. It can also contain parameters to pass values to the next step. For example, when a product is created, you may need to send some information about the customer, like the name and email address, as well as the item to the order fulfillment system.

1. What is data masking?

2. Why do you need to use data masking?

3. How to use data masking in Informatica.

4. What are some examples of when you need to mask data in Informatica?

In conclusion, Data masking in Informatica can be a useful technique when you want to hide your sensitive data in a spreadsheet that contains data you don’t want other people to see. For example, you may have confidential client information in a spreadsheet that you want to share with your sales team, but not with the accounting department. To accomplish this, you can use data masking.

 

 

 

 

 


Updated 02-May-2023
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