You put your prized possessions in a safe, lock your home, and frequently change your digital passwords. When it comes to protecting what’s valuable, chances are you’re not willing to cut corners. The same principle needs to apply to your data.
Data anonymization, the process of removing or encrypting personally identifiable information from a data set, is critical, especially in sandboxes. It allows developers or admins to work with data without compromising confidential information. But anonymization can only go so far if you don’t have the right capabilities. In this post, learn about Own Accelerate's new feature, Custom Anonymization, and how it makes anonymization faster, safer, and easier.
Ensure compliance
Anonymization is the backbone of protected sandbox data. But, if it falls short in any way, you could be putting more than your data at risk. For highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, or the public sector, a non-compliant sandbox can have huge reputational, financial, and regulatory consequences.
To ensure compliance, it’s important to examine how data could be compromised. Traditional anonymization pulls from a realistic library of fake data–creating standardized field requirements. While that's helpful for some of your data, your org might have unique field requirements. If anonymization values deviate from a specified field format, say a specific email pattern or healthcare member ID number, anonymization will fail–potentially exposing your confidential, sensitive data in the sandbox. With Custom Anonymization, you can ensure that protecting your customers’ data is always top of mind. It allows you to create certain field formats unique to your org while upholding anonymization to keep sandboxes free of sensitive data.
For example, if you’re a financial services company, you’re likely generating and handling bank routing numbers that follow a very specific format. Custom Anonymization allows you to create a pattern using the number range and free text building blocks to mimic an actual bank routing number. Your admins and developers can experiment with a subset of production data that looks like its original counterpart without exposing confidential information. For regulated industries like financial services, having precise field values honors both your unique data and compliance needs.
Minimize distractions
Whether you’re writing code, building configurations, conducting training, or performing changes, the last thing you want in your sandbox are distractions. Unfortunately, distractions can pile up quickly if you're seeding your sandbox using standard anonymization. Even the slightest data incongruence can trigger validation rules or errors, distracting you from what really matters: building the best solutions in your Salesforce org. This can also be coupled with duplication issues (when anonymized values are repeated), triggering a duplicate value error. With Custom Anonymization, your customized field requirements eliminate error message interruptions. As a result, you and your team can stay on track from the start, creating solutions more efficiently–without pesky disruptions.
Get to work, faster
Every minute counts when you're innovating, and delays can cost both time and money. Custom Anonymization helps your team dive into meaningful work versus tedious data legwork to set up the environment. Traditionally, if you want specific, anonymized data in your sandbox, you’d have to do it manually or write scripts to anonymize values that would meet the requirements. This is time spent away from creating and testing—the whole reason you’re in the sandbox in the first place. With Custom Anonymization, you can support focused, uninterrupted innovation throughout the entire development life cycle while saving time from workarounds.
Cut production time without cutting corners with Own
Your data is unique, and your sandbox seeding capabilities should reflect that. With Accelerate's Custom Anonymization, you can make the anonymization process faster, safer, and easier. The intuitive, drag-and-drop feature saves time from manually creating test data or writing scripts while ensuring compliance. Want to see the difference that Custom Anonymization can make in your sandbox? Request a demo today.
