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In this post, I am sharing an easy note on what is a Data Masking and why it is necessary for the data security.
What is Data Masking?
The Data masking is a kind of mask over the important data. Means, the format of data remains the same, and only the values are changed.
This process is not for all kinds of data or tables, but the organization can select important data like Credit Card Number and perform Data Masking on the sensitive information.
In this masking process, the structure remains similar and only information will change. We are not going to change data type of
the column or field and we just change the value of that column of field.
In another term, we can say data masking is a process for creating different versions of sensitive data.
Some organization requires Data Masking on those data which are
needed for the testing team as a sample data so that software developer or tester team cannot access actual sensitive data.
In Data Masking, You can create, replicate column or you can change the version of data before displaying to the user.
There are many techniques you can choose to perform Data Masking like Substitution, Shuffling, Encryption.
For more theory and practical you can visit this articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_masking
https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3091/masking-personal-identifiable-sql-server-data/