Connecting to PostgreSQL-compatible databases for data movement and manipulation in IRI Workbench-supported products like Voracity, CoSort, FieldShield, NextForm and RowGen follows the same paradigm as other relational databases.
Usually static data masking is performed on production data at rest so it is stored safely, or when replicated to non-production environments for testing or development purposes.
IRI Workbench provides a number of features for working across multiple tables in a database. It includes wizards to: profile databases; classify columns; subset, mask and migrate data; generate test data; etc.
Connecting to and working with data in an Snowflake AWS database from IRI Workbench (WB) is no different than with an on-premise SQL-compatible source. You browse Snowflake tables and exchange metadata in Workbench via JDBC.
Quasi-identifiers, or indirect identifiers, are personal attributes that are true about, but not necessarily unique, to an individual. Examples are one’s age or date of birth, race, salary, educational attainment, occupation, marital status and zip code.
Note: This article covers the third available IRI customer method for statically masking or encrypting PII in structured MongoDB collections through the IRI FieldShield product or IRI Voracity platform (both powered by IRI CoSort v10 and its support of the native MongoDB driver).
Editors Note, Q2’19: In addition to the method described below, there is now also available to IRI FieldShield (data masking product) or IRI Voracity (data management platform) users a Data Class Database Masking wizard, which can be used if you have pre-classified your data.
The Schema Pattern Search in IRI Workbench (WB) can be used to retrieve data in an entire schema matching specific patterns. The search process compares the patterns to all the data in every column of the selected data types in every table in every schema selected.
According to Simson L. Garfinkel at the NIST Information Access Division’s Information Technology Laboratory,
De-identification is not a single technique, but a collection of approaches, algorithms, and tools that can be applied to different kinds of data with differing levels of effectiveness.
Detecting additions and updates to database tables for data replication, ETL, PII masking, and other incremental data movement and manipulation activities can be automated in IRI Voracity workflows designed and run in IRI Workbench (WB).
The “New Multi Table Protection Job …” wizard in IRI Workbench described in this article is one of the ways that IRI FieldShield product (or IRI Voracity platform) users can automatically mask personally identifiable information (PII) in database columns that are part of a foreign key relationship, and thus preserve referential integrity between the tables.