Portus Data Virtualisation

CCA Software Pty Ltd will always recommend that our synthetic data generation capability is used wherever possible as it ensures that there is absolutely no link between production data and the data used for testing. However, this is not always possible as often related data and record sets are needed for specific tests. These may have values and calculations that are inter-related for example and thus need some ‘real’ test data from the production systems. However, this data may only be used if the personal data in these records is comprehensively masked.

Ostia believes that masking should be more than just eliminating fields by overwriting them with rubbish or other values; using Ostia’s data generation routines, masking can be achieved by replacing the name for the real person with a valid name that does not represent anybody; their address can be replaced with a valid address that does not represent anyone and so on.

Ostia prides itself specifically on Portus’ ability to mask data from difficult to access data sources such as mainframes including CICS, VSAM, flat files etc. and other legacy systems such as Solaris, HP UX and AS/400, along with other legacy data sources such as Domino from IBM or Natural and ADABAS from Software AG.

In addition, Ostia can facilitate the masking of data in a batch mode to create a masked set of data in a database but can also mask data on the fly through the provision of Web Services through which the masked data may be accessed.