Data sensitivity issues and corporate compliance, where do companies stand?

Extractor Compliance Edition helps to address a range of compliance legislation requirements

Personal and private data usage by companies is strictly controlled by a host of regulatory constraints across the world. Examples are: the Data Protection Act in the UK, HIPAA and Gramm Leach Bliley in the US, PIPEDa in Canada etc. Any company that handles personal or potentially sensitive data is required to exercise extreme caution in the ways that such data is stored and handled.

In recognition of this, Original Software, global market leaders in software testing for the IBM iSeries, has released the Compliance Edition of its leading data extraction module, Extractor for iSeries. The new module is designed to address this key vulnerability by offering an effortless way to ‘desensitise’ personal data. The new Edition contains a data scrambling facility that enables users to automatically desensitise personal data – while still maintaining a structure that can be used sensibly for training or testing purposes.

Extractor for iSeries, part of Original’s market-leading TestBench suite of iSeries productivity solutions, is already well established as the iSeries data extraction module of choice. Its primary function is to create subsets of a live database that retain referential integrity and are therefore perfect miniature representations of the live environment. The new ‘data scrambling’ facility then vertically and logically scrambles the data to provide complete desensitivity protection - yet without corrupting the underlying data subset.

Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software say: “Regulatory controls are continuing to have an ever greater impact upon the ways that companies do business. The various data control measures all carry with them serious penalties, including fines and imprisonment. What we offer here is a fast and easy solution for iSeries users to ensure that they do not fall foul of such legislation – while leveraging all the other benefits of using the leading iSeries data extraction solution.”

Extractor Compliance Edition also includes as standard: database auto-analysis, automated data maintenance, data manipulation (updating, sampling, archiving), and extraction reports for auditing. Extractor will replicate the structure of the database and provide an exact reduced replica according to user-preset parameters. These combine to provide better quality test data, and avoid the disk space issues inherent in production database copies.

Original Software has set out to prove its point and is hosting live webinar demonstrations. To book a place on one of these webinars call (630) 321-0092 in the US. or +44 (0)1256 338666 in the UK. You can also email requests to solutions@origsoft.com