From Weeks to Hours: Accelerating Data Masking and Enabling Easy B2B Data Sharing for a Leading Bank

A leading bank, ranked among the top 20 in its market, provides services to millions of customers daily. Staying at the forefront of this competitive market requires not only stable and updated infrastructure but also rapid feature delivery to maintain the highest service quality.

Challenge

The bank faced a critical challenge in enabling safe sharing of client data with external vendors providing development and QA services. These vendors required access to realistic data for accurate testing, but using real client information posed significant security risks. This access became a major target for penetration attacks, threatening data security, customer trust, and the bank’s overall reputation.

To address this, the bank initially relied on internally developed data masking scripts. However, these scripts were resource-intensive, requiring specialized skills to maintain, and took several weeks to mask their 40 TB Oracle database. This slow process delayed incident management, disrupted release cycles, and struggled to maintain data consistency across multiple databases, creating a bottleneck for safe and efficient data sharing.

Solution

DataSan offers several advanced features that make it a comprehensive solution for data masking. It supports major databases such as Oracle, MS SQL, and PostgreSQL, and is designed to operate directly at the database level, providing a significant speed advantage over ETL-based solutions. With customizable masking functions, DataSan allows organizations to mask over 1,000,000 table rows per minute, making it both efficient and scalable. Additionally, DataSan ensures compliance with key data protection regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, enabling safe data sharing with external partners while maintaining data privacy and security.

PFLB was provided with a copy of the database in a secure, closed network environment to ensure no external access. The goal was to accelerate the masking process while maintaining data reliability and security.

Results

PFLB’s engineers had successfully deployed the DataSan solution. After profiling the database, they identified all private data requiring masking, which was then approved by the bank. Once approved, the PFLB team initiated the masking process.

The results were impressive: the entire 40 TB database was masked in just 38 hours, achieving a masking rate of approximately 1 TB per hour. Following the completion of the masking, the bank’s team conducted functionality testing using the masked database, ensuring that all business workflows worked as usual and were not affected by the changed data. In other words, the data was masked but still consistent—all tests passed without issue.

Benefits

With the implementation of the DataSan solution, the bank can now significantly expedite release cycles, delivering new features to customers faster than the competition. The risks of data leakage have been eliminated.

About PFLB

PFLB offers advanced data masking and performance testing services to help organizations identify and mitigate risks, ensuring secure and efficient IT operations. To learn more, please contact sales.