IBM i Data Security: Are you Sitting Comfortably?

Test Data solved in four steps 1. Extract, 2. Scramble, 3. Verify, 4. Roll-back

The IBM i has arguably the best security record of any business application platform in common use. A great place to be if you have one. 

But pressures on data security have increased dramatically in the last few years with greater penalties for carelessness and exposure.  Despite this, live data is frequently exposed in test environments.  Live data is nice to have for testing, but do your employees, customers, partners, suppliers, students etc know you have scant regard for their personal information and does this approach leave you exposed to litigation and fines?  Yes, almost certainly it does.

Here is the first of 4 key steps to avoid this situation…

     1. Extract data from live.  You don’t need all of it, you don’t want it all.  You want an intelligent subset that drives the key test conditions.  It means testing is quicker, more predictable and you can probably have more parallel test environments to further speed up testing productivity.  You need a solution that will quickly rebuild your test environments maintaining referential integrity, automatically. 

More about the following steps (Scramble, Verify and Roll-back) next time.

But you can solve all of these problems with proven modules of TestBench, the market-leading Test Data Management solution for IBM i. Modules between $5,000 and $10,000 (regardless of your processor size).  Companies like Allianz, Barnes & Noble, Costco do it every day.

You can too!