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Develop and Outsource Using Production Formats, Not Production Data

Challenges:

Part of the governance role in protecting data at risk is assessing and avoiding the use of unsafe production data used for prototyping. Realistic test data is needed for:
• application stress and range-testing
• outsourced program development
• simulated database population
• hardware and software benchmarking
• sharing custom file and report formats

Very often those who need test data merely replicate the production database, or use snippets of real production files – both of which are inherently risky because they can expose sensitive, private data.

Meanwhile, generating realistic test data can be difficult: Custom programs may take a long time to write, modify or maintain Third-party test data generators may be slow, complex, and functionally-limited It is difficult to format test data in exact production file or report layouts What if you need to simultaneously sort, join or select from the generated data?

Solutions:

You can now recommend and use a tool that easily generates safe test data in custom file formats for all of the above uses. Specifically, the SortCL tool within CoSort v9, and CoSort’s Test Data (RowGen) tool, can both generate (and transform) safe test field data in real report and production file formats that you can send outside the firewall.

Any number, size, type, and position of fields, records, or files can be specified in a single job script and I/O pass. Various selection and ranging criteria can be applied to synthesize and stress applications. Using SortCL, you can mix and match random with real data, and with other field-level data protection techniques at the same time.

If you use SortCL already to define production file layouts, you can also use the same metadata to create safe test data in the same formats (in CoSort V9 or in RowGen). If you use the less expensive RowGen tool now, the same metadata you use to define test data can be migrated for use in SortCL to transform real data in the same format(s) when it becomes available.

Both tools read easy job scripts to randomly generate fake, or randomly select real, data to populate your the test files. A variety of logging and audit functions are available, too. Either way, you can simulate sensitive field data, and risk management officers can validate compliance before data are outsourced.

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IRI, The CoSort Company