Security and technology consulting company Accutive is rolling out a new solution designed to give enterprises an alternative to data encryption to protect sensitive information.
In a press release on Wednesday (Feb. 20), Accutive said it is launching its Data Discovery and Data Masking solutions.
Data Discovery enables businesses to identify sensitive data that will require specific regulatory compliance measures. Data Masking, meanwhile, lets businesses “mask” sensitive data as an alternative to encryption. Accutive said that the combination of both solutions supports organizations’ data protection compliance and security needs under GDPR, HIPAA and other data protection regulations.
“It’s important to keep in mind that data masking is not the same as data encryption in that encrypted data is unrecognizable and unusable, and that the formatting is not always well-preserved,” explained Davood Ghods, former chief of the Office of Technology Services for the State of California, in a statement. “Accutive offers a true enterprise data masking solution for users that want to copy and move sensitive data containing personally identifiable information (PII) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) information from the security of their production environments to less secure testing environments, or for third-party use.”
In another statement, Accutive CEO Fariborz Ordukhani said the solutions reduce the risk of a data breach “by decreasing the risk of disclosing sensitive data that resides in testing, training, development or third-party environments.”
“Data Masking gives users the ability to anonymize data easily, regardless of where the data is stored,” Ordukhani added.
GDPR compliance has emerged as a particularly difficult regulation for some corporate compliance teams. Earlier this year, Cisco research identified the combination of security best practices and cybersecurity technology investments as the most effective course of action to prevent data breaches. According to Cisco analysis, companies that are GDPR-ready are also less likely to experience a data breach, see fewer internal records impacted by a data breach and experience shorter downtimes as a result of a breach.