Basel-II News

Micro Focus Data Express Provides Organizations with Secure, Compliant Test Data Environment

(Oct 30, 2007)-- Micro Focus, provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions, today announced the availability of Micro Focus Data Express, a suite of tools used to create a robust and secure test environment for production data. Data Express protects privacy while enhancing the reliability of test data, enabling users to quickly and efficiently extract relevant subsets of application data for development testing. The solution also ensures application quality and reliability while complying with strict regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, PCI and HIPAA. As a result, organizations are able to remain compliant and reduce costs and risk while improving time-to-market for application upgrades.

“Many enterprises process significant amounts of data that are increasingly subject to regulation. Without the appropriate de-identification practices in place, companies run the risk of exposing sensitive personal or financial data to security and privacy breaches,” said Stuart McGill, CTO at Micro Focus. “Data Express allows customers to rapidly build representative subsets of production data by de-identifying that data through data masking. Customers benefit from the accurate, secure and reliable generation of test data while ensuring they meet the latest compliance and privacy regulations.”

In order to create representative data to ensure accurate testing, organizations must access all types of data from across the enterprise – including sensitive or personal information subject to strict compliance regulations. Micro Focus Data Express features a sophisticated masking module, which makes sensitive data anonymous in testing environments. It removes data elements containing sensitive information, making it impossible to trace personal information from representative production data. As a result, Data Express customers can implement rigorous testing procedures of all data without fear of regulatory non-compliance or personal or financial information breaches.

Micro Focus Data Express collates data from across the enterprise into a single, easy-to-use interface. It creates an inventory of organizational data to be taken, collated and stored in a central repository. Data from strategic and business-critical application data stores, including IMS , DB2, VSAM, and Oracle can be collated. The resulting information can then be reviewed from a single administrator desktop, yielding a single view of mission-critical data.

Data Express also enables users to significantly reduce operational expenses associated with manual testing by optimizing the process of test environment generation. The solution allows users to extract a consistent and congruent subset of data, reducing the volumes of data run in the test environment. It identifies relevant variables and analyzes large databases to derive the correct amount of data for testing in the best possible time. The reduction of data that must be transferred to the test environment results in faster and more accurate testing. Additional benefits include:

* Risk of service downtime caused by unrevealed errors is lowered by increasing the quality of test data, allowing each project to be tested based on up-to-date, consistent test data
* Automated processes reduce the cost of manually creating test environments
* Faster processes reduce the time of the testing period, lowering the costs of test phases and ensuring quicker time-to-market
* Eliminate the expense of maintaining and storing multiple full size data stores.

Share or bookmarklet this web page at: