"Software is eating the world," as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011. Since then, more and more industries have been transformed by software, to the point where the largest distributor of films has no cinemas (Netflix,) the largest provider of delivery services has no cars (Uber) and the largest renter of rooms owns no hotels (Airbnb). Software - especially the development of company-specific applications and platforms with the power to create sustainable advantage and even transform entire industries - has become a critical lever of business strategy in even the most unlikely business segments. Meanwhile, physical and technical infrastructure, the source of differentiated capability for decades, if not centuries, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be accessed at the lowest possible cost.
Providing large businesses with the agility they need to keep up with the pace of innovation increasingly means helping them dramatically reduce the cycle time for new application development. A major impediment to that acceleration is the inability of developers and database architects to get rapid, reliable access to current, high-fidelity data to support application testing, sometimes called Test Data Management. Operations teams are often challenged to provide that access without sacrificing control of production data, which can include personally identifiable or other sensitive information, such as social security or credit card account numbers.
Actifio and Camouflage solutions combine to accelerate enterprise application development and improve release quality while actually increasing the data control that is essential to staying out of the headlines for all the wrong reasons. The power of Actifio's data virtualisation combined with the safety of enterprise-grade data masking from Camouflage fundamentally transforms the landscape of test data management, giving developers and test teams self-serve, instant access to masked, controlled virtual copies of data that both speed up development cycles by reducing wait times and reduce bugs through the use of high-fidelity copies of production data.
Camouflage's industry-leading CX-Mask™ data masking software augments the Actifio solution by removing, de-identifying, and anonymising the sensitive data, while still retaining the realism and functionality of the original data set. The masking application secures the data, achieves security and compliance, and provisions non-production environments with high quality, realistic data for a variety of Test/Dev functions.
"Agile and DevOps approaches for end-to-end application deployment require frequent, rapid, iterative testing and continuous release management, and for these to be successful, access to current, reliable data is critical," said Melinda-Carol Ballou, Program Director, Application Life-Cycle Management & Executive Strategies, IDC. "At the same time, regulatory compliance and customer identity protection needs demand obfuscation of sensitive data – especially throughout development and testing process. All too frequently, development and test groups hang onto whatever data they can get, storing it under their desks or wherever may be most convenient, putting the business at risk for a total data breach." For more of IDC's perspective on Optimising Test Data Management, please see this recent blog.
"We've come together with Actifio because we share an understanding of our enterprise customers' pain points in application development," said Kevin Duggan, President and Chief Executive Officer at Camouflage. "Speed to market, quality and security of critical data don't have to be at odds, and through the use of Camouflage in Actifio's test/dev workflows, customers have controlled, masked, realistic data that improves their releases and ultimately business outcomes."
Built on its patented, revolutionary Virtual Data Pipeline™ (VDP) technology, the Actifio copy data virtualisation solution replaces a hodgepodge of data management tools with a single, cloud-friendly platform to protect and manage applications running on physical or virtual servers, especially common databases used by business applications such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. The Actifio solutions for test data management serve enterprise development needs by providing:
- Performance that can scale to accommodate hundreds of developers, very large databases (VLDBs) over 10 TB, and petabyte ecosystems;
- Support for development and test environments that can mirror production exactly, such as Oracle RMAN (Recovery Manager) with RAC (Real Application Clusters) and ASM (Automatic Storage Management) on fibre channel storage networks, reducing inconsistencies between development and operations;
- Multi-application and hypervisor support so that investment in a single copy data virtualisation platform addresses multiple use cases and application environments, and
- API and CLI accessibility, so that automated Actifio test data provisioning can be integrated into DevOps-style toolchains, or so DBAs have the flexibility to integrate data provisioning commands into their existing CLI-based processes.
"Partnering with Camouflage ensures that our customers have access to a best-of-breed sensitive data management solution with a proven track record of protecting Fortune 500-class business data," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO and Founder of Actifio. "Bottom line: Actifio copy data virtualisation and Camouflage data masking keep businesses safer while helping them build higher-quality applications, faster."
