Create Safe Test Data for Outsourcing Files, Reports, and Applications

Home » Solutions » Test Data Files » Outsourcing

Safe Test Data for Outsourcing

» Solutions

Test Data/Files

"Companies of all sizes, industries, and geographic locations are increasingly subject to a host of complex requirements regarding PID privacy and security. Such obligations become even more critical when the company is engaged in outsourcing, especially overseas, where there may be less actual control over the service provider and where the legal and regulatory environment impacting the service provider will be different."

Read the Goodwin Proctor LLP Corporate Counsel Article, "The Case For Factoring Data Privacy, and Security Considerations, into a Company's Outsourcing Strategy"

Do the Right Thing -- Adhere to Privacy Laws

Challenges:

You you need to share the format of your data and files with others, but the actual elements of that data are sensitive, classified, or do not yet exist. You are concerned about public confidence in your company's privacy policies and need to comply with existing and future privacy laws, especially if you work with solution providers overseas.

According to at least one lawmaker, the growing outsourcing trend threatens to undermine medical and financial privacy protections that consumers and legislators have fought hard to achieve:

"Privacy issues until now have mostly been in the U.S., but I think people are not aware of how much of their information is going outside the United States. I can't monitor medical information after it is sent overseas, but I can do something about it in the state." - California state senator Liz Figueroa

In addition to sensitive medical data, information shipped to foreign workers can include bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, stock holdings and credit card numbers -- all valuable information to identity thieves.*

Solutions are needed to protect this data -- or simulate it through realistic test data -- so exposure of real personal information is impossible.

Solutions:

It's easier not to fight privacy legislation. If you have data at risk in files at rest or in motion, IR tools let you:

Protect fields in your production files or reports
and/or
Put safe test data into real file or report formats

Specifically, IRI's CoSort software can apply auditable, field-level encryption, de-identification, and other security functions to your files as you transform and/or report from them. CoSort, and its SortCL tool in particular, marries data protection with data processing so you can minimize risk along with performance bottlenecks.

The RowGen (test data) product creates safe test data in real file formats that you can send with confidence outside the firewall.

Use either tool to mask, transform, and format data into one or more custom files (simultaneously). This way, you can simulate and share actual file or report layouts without exposing any private field contents.

IRI, The CoSort Company