Informatica Test Data Management (TDM) Reviews

Data Masking and creating subsets of data.

One of our banking clients didn’t want to give live business data to developers, as it had sensitive information. We had to mask the data using Informatica TDM and leverage its built-in algorithm of seed values.

We also had to create a subset of data that had to be given to different teams. For example, the sales team only needed sales information and didn’t require customer information such as Social Security Number. The team working on credit information needed the Social Security Number. So we created subsets of data for each team from the master data.

They have to create more transformations that can be utilized in the tool. TDM has limited capability in this regard.

I have been using this product for almost a year.

We never had issues with stability.

Informatica is highly scalable.

Technical support was really helpful when we were setting up our servers and they responded fairly quickly to questions.

We did not have anything before, as our client is a big Informatica vendor. A close second was IBM InfoSphere Optim.

The setup was fairly straightforward once you set up the nodes, servers, repositories, and environment variables.

I am not aware of the pricing of this product.

We looked at IBM InfoSphere, but we were always going with the Informatica product. We already had other Informatica products.

Only use this product if you have business requirement for creating subsets and masking. If you need real time masking, you can utilize Informatica Dynamic Data Masking.

The product provides four main features:

Data discovery to profile data and mask sensitive data.

Data subsetting to take a subset of production data from all schema tables while preserving referential integrity.

Data masking to create masking rules and mask the fields that we select.

Data generation If we don’t want to mask production data, the tool can generate data based on rules that we configure.

All of the features are strong, however my favorite is data masking. Also, it provides many built-in rules and rules that we can customize to mask all types of data. The masking engine is very strong.

TDM includes built in policy packs, and these are masking and data discovery techniques that are created for common confidential fields like name, Date of Birth, address… Such fields that you can find almost in every database in any company.

The data discovery techniques are regular expressions (RegEx) that are executed on the metadata (the column names) or the data itself to find matches to my discovery.

Example: a data discovery rule with a regular expression set to *name* will find all the fields that include “name” like First_name_EN, full_name_FR… but it will not return the field FN_EN (And I mean by this First Name English)

So if I want to discover all the fileds in my database that might include names I will miss some, since the data discovery rule with RegEx = *name* is very simple and needs to be more complex to cover all columns syntaxes.

I did the implementation for many clients. It is mostly used to mask production data and get values that are realistic but not real. With this, they create development and testing environments with data that looks like it’s real. Developers and UAT will be able to work with such better data sets.

Data discovery and the built in policy packs are very simple; they need stronger ones.

I have been using Informatica since 2012.

I have not encountered stability issues.

I have not encountered scalability issues.

Informatica provides good support for this tool, from knowledge base to tickets for direct support. Any issue is always solved thanks to their support.

I have not used another tool.

To install TDM, you need to install PowerCenter first, which is another Informatica tool. So the installation takes time but it’s always smooth and not that complex.

This is the only product I’ve used.

I recommend it. A very user friendly tool and it’s not mandatory to be technical to use it.

Data masking is the most valuable feature of this product.

I could mask PHI and PII information in my data before sharing it with both the testing teams and the teams that are outside our organization.

If there were some methods to mask data in the cloud, then that would be good.

I have been using this solution for one year.

We have not encountered any stability issues. It is highly stable.

It is highly scalable.

The technical support is excellent.

I have not used another different solution before. This is the first time I am using such a solution.

The initial setup process was straightforward.

It is an excellent product. It is easily maintainable and flexible. The pricing and licensing policy depends upon the budget and compliance needs for the project.

We have not evaluated any other product prior to this solution.

Go ahead and use this product. It is easy for an organization to train the employees with this product.