Category Archives: Application ILM
Is The Data Explosion Impacting You? How Do You Compare To Your Peers?
The digitization of everything is creating a data explosion near you. Whether data is accumulating in the data center, in the cloud, on your laptop or mobile device, sometimes too much of something isn’t always a good thing. In a recent webinar cohosted by Informatica and Symantec, we polled our listeners to find out how the data explosion was impacting them. We also asked what type of unstructured and structured data is growing the fastest. Check out what they said. (more…)
Improve Efficiencies in Test Data Management
According to analysts[1], users spend the majority of the application development lifecycle in development and testing and the least amount of time in quality management and documentation. This is probably not very shocking to anyone in QA or on a testing team. But how much time is actually spent on test data management? In a recent webinar, more than half of the listeners polled say they spend between 30-40% of their effort on ‘data related tasks.’ (more…)
Enterprise Data Archiving Is White Hot
Informatica recently hosted a webinar on Enterprise Data Archiving Best Practices with guest speakers, Tony Baer from Ovum and Murali Rathnam from Symantec IT. With over 600 registrations, I would say that enterprise data archiving is not hot, it is white hot. At least for Informatica. With Big Data entering the data center, organizations are looking for ways to make room – either in the budget or in the data center itself. Archiving is a proven approach that achieves both. Given the complexities and interconnections of enterprise applications, Enterprise Data Archive solutions based on market leading technologies such as Informatica Data Archive, can deliver on the value proposition while meeting tough requirements. (more…)
Big Data is Here to Stay – Now We Get to Manage It
It’s official, “big data” is here to stay and the solutions, concepts, hardware and services to support these massive implementations are going to continue to grow at a rapid pace. However, every organization has their own definition of big data and how it plays in their organization. One area that we are seeing a lot of activity in is “big transaction data” for OLTP and relational databases because relational databases often lack the true management capabilities to scale transactional applications into the higher TBs and PBs. In this post we will explore some ways that your existing OLTP system can scale without crushing IT and your budget in the process. (more…)
The Information Currency – Google’s Transparency Report
Last November saw Google announce the findings of its bi-annual Transparency Report. Interestingly, the findings revealed that government surveillance of online lives is on a sharp incline. In fact, governments around the world made nearly 21,000 requests for access to Google data in the first six months of 2012, a huge leap from the 12,539 requests reported in 2009. The US government was the biggest culprit, making 7,969 requests in the first six months of 2012, while Turkey made the most requests for content to be removed.
Despite the big numbers, this demand for data should come as no surprise. Information is increasingly being accepted as the currency of today, so it fits that demand for Google data would be so high. Data is an undeniably invaluable asset and both the private and the public sector are realising this. (more…)
Informatica Wins Award for Best Security Software
Last night Informatica was given the Silver award for Best Security Software by Info Security. The Best Security Software was one of the most competitive categories—with 8 finalists offering technologies ranging from mobile to cloud security.
Informatica won the award for its new Cloud Data Masking solution. Starting in June of last year, Informatica has steadily released a series of new Cloud solutions for data security. Informatica is the first to offer a comprehensive, data governance based solution for cloud data privacy. This solution addresses the full lifecycle of data privacy, including:
- Defining and classifying sensitive data
- Discovering where sensitive data lives
- Applying consistent data masking rules
- Measuring and monitoring to prove compliance
The Cloud Data Masking adds to Informatica’s leading cloud integration solution for salesforce.com includes data synchronization, data replication, data quality, and master data management.
Why is Cloud Data Masking important?
Sensitive data is at risk of being exposed during application development and testing, where it is important to use real production data to rigorously test applications. As reported by the Ponemon Institute, a data breach costs organizations on average $5.5 million dollars.
What does Cloud Data Masking do?
Based on Informatica’s market leading Data Masking technology, Informatica’s new Cloud Data Masking enables cloud customers to secure sensitive information during the testing phase by directly masking production data used within cloud sandboxes, creating realistic-looking, but de-identified data. Customers are therefore able to protect sensitive information from unintended exposure during development, test and training activities; streamline cloud projects by reducing the time it takes to mask test/training/development environments; and ensure compliance with mounting privacy regulations.
What do people do today?
Many organizations today will hand the masking efforts over to IT. This inevitably lengthens development cycles and delays releases. One of Informatica’s longtime customers and current partners, David Cheung of Cloud Sherpas, stated “Many customers wait days for IT to change the sensitive or confidential data, delaying releases. For example, I was at customer last week where the customer was waiting 5 days for IT to mask the sensitive data.”
Others use scripting or manual methods to mask the data. One prospect I spoke to recently said he manually altered the data but missed a few email addresses. So during a test run, the company accidentally sent emails to customers. These customers called back to demand what was going on. Do you want that to happen to you?
Visit Informatica Cloud Data Masking for more information.
Ready for Your Data Security Audit?
In a recent survey of Informatica customers,
• Over 60% of companies had a security audit in the last year
• 35% of the companies had an internal security audit
• 16% of the companies had both an internal security audit and one performed by an external auditor
• In addition, many of these organizations saw that another company in their same industry suffered a data breach.
These results are reinforced by the discussions I had with Audit and Compliance IT owners from various industries. Audits are on the rise as more customers require these audits before purchase. Compliance IT requires reports at a database or system level showing that the data has been protected. And they want to see these reports on a regular basis as data, including test data pulled from production environments, changes frequently.
Driving these audits and Informatica projects to protect data were the following top regulatory drivers (as reported by customers):
• SOX
• PCI
• PII
• PHI
These results are reinforced by the increasing use of Informatica’s regulatory and industry packs (containing pre-built rules and metadata), including PCI, PHI and PII. In addition to these areas, organizations I’ve spoken to are implementing projects to also protect non-public information, or confidential company information. For example, last week I spoke to a company about how they share detailed financial information about their company as part of the data they said to an outsourced partner. This financial information could be easily used to estimate company’s revenues and profits for any given quarter—before that information is released to the street, if at all.
In this same survey, the top benefits customers said that Informatica’s solution addressed included:
• Increasing productivity by leveraging pre-built masking techniques, accelerators and purpose-built tools
• Reducing the time it took to identify and capture optimal test cases, therefore reducing overall testing time
• Reducing the risk of data breach
Are you ready for your data security audit?
For more information on Informatica’s data security solutions for non-production environments, please join us for an upcoming webinar:
For more information on Informatica’s data security solutions in general, please see:
Announcing Informatica Cloud Spring 2013
On Wednesday we announced our latest cloud integration release – Informatica Cloud Spring 2013. It’s a major step forward in terms of breadth and depth for our software as a service (SaaS) solution. Why, you ask?
- Didn’t all of our cloud integration customers get upgraded to the Winter release in November?
- Didn’t we just broaden into cloud-based master data management (MDM)?
- Don’t we have 3-4 releases per year?
Well, yes…but…there are a few aspects to today’s announcement that I think are particularly noteworthy. Here’s a summary.
Data Privacy Still the Talk of the Town
Recently, the UK’s Parliament and the Internet conference brought together leading figures from Government, Parliament, academia and the industry to discuss and debate the most pressing policy issues facing the Internet.
As expected, data privacy and security was top of the agenda for much of the day, with a number of discussions highlighting the extent to which consumer data is being exposed to security risks and the need for the right legislation and protection to keep it safe. (more…)
Me, Myself and Midata
Some interesting news hit UK headlines last year that companies could be made to give the public greater access to their personal transaction data in an electronic, portable and machine-readable format. That’s if the midata project has anything to do with it.
Launched in April 2011 midata is part of the UK Government’s consumer empowerment strategy, Better Choices: Better Deals. Essentially, it’s a partnership between government, consumer groups and major businesses. Its aim is to give consumers access to the data that they produce, from the likes of household utilities, and banking, to internet transactions and high street loyalty cards. (more…)
Loading ...