Secure and realistic testing would prevent data leakage

Peter Mollins looks at organisations' shaky defences during the testing process and what can be done to secure them

Peter Mollins: Application testing is crucial

Many organisations do not take the necessary precautions to secure their data, although there are plenty of products available to do this.

An extra firewall or a new layer of encryption technology is not enough.

The way to ensure IT systems are still operating at full capacity after any change to the business is through application testing, using realistic data. Many data breaches are caused by the use of live data in testing and development, such as customer records, employee records, or credit card and other confidential information.

Despite having their fingers burned this year, organisations are still leaving themselves open to breaches – often on a weekly basis.

The risk is intensified by the unmanageable sizes of data tested. Many use test data files that are larger than one terabyte, with some running to more than 50 terabytes.

I believe that each record that is lost or stolen can cost an organisation about a hundred pounds.

To guarantee secure and realistic testing, businesses should have automated and repeatable test data management.

They must begin by accessing relational and hierarchical databases and other data stores from the mainframe and distributed systems. This test data should be subset to make it more manageable and reduce data storage and test execution costs.

Private data must be concealed within test data sets to comply with data privacy regulations and shrink the risk of data breaches.

Businesses need to guarantee they are looking after the information they already possess. Testing is always going to be an integral part of a company’s development.

CIOs must establish a firm data protection strategy for the production environment as well as for the use of live data in testing and application development. And the assessment and implementation of these masking and subsetting techniques need to be an integral part of this.

Cutting corners leaves organisations vulnerable to data leakage that damages databases and reputations.

Peter Mollins is product marketing director at Micro Focus