How to protect test data

Like I mentioned in a previous post, many things are more complicated than you first think. Testing IT systems that handle sensitive data is a good example of this.

You probably don't want to use real data in testing because of the compliance issues that it can cause. On the other hand, you also want your test data to be as much like the real data as possible to make the results of any testing reflect the behavior of the system under real conditions as much as possible. This is actually tricky to do.

It looks like our marketing guys have put together a webinar that talks about how to solve this very problem, so if this is of interest to you, you might want to consider checking it out. You can sign up for it here if it sounds interesting.

Her's a quick summary of this webinar:

Securing Confidential Data in Non-Production Environments
End-to-End Data Protection for Test, Development and Outsourced Systems

Date: December 9, 2009

Time: 10 am PST / 1 pm EST

Duration: 60 minutes

This webinar doesn't have as clever a name as the last one that we had (The Renaissance of Enterprise Key Management and the Barbarian Hordes), but I'm sure that it will contain lots of useful information.