My last article spurred a flood of questions about the difference between Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Data Masking and the Application Management Pack’s (AMP) Data Scrambling features.
What is Data Masking?
The act of anonymizing customer, financial, or company confidential data to create new, legible data, which retains the original data’s properties, such as its width, type, and format.
The Oracle Enterprise Manager Data Masking Pack uses an irreversible process to replace sensitive data with realistic looking but scrubbed data based on masking rules. This ensures that original data cannot be retrieved, recovered or restored.
This feature was introduced in Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR4.
Major features of Data Masking
- Maintains Automatic Database Referential Integrity when masking primary keys
- Implicit – database enforced
- Explicit – application enforced
- Provides out-of-the-box Data mask format library
- View sample data before masking
- Application masking templates using the Export Mask Definition capability
- Define once; execute multiple times
Masking processes are traditionally slow because they perform table updates. The Data Masking Pack takes an advantage of built-in optimizations in the database to disable database logging and runs in parallel to quickly create a masked replacement for the original table.
Distinguishing OEM Data Masking and AMP Data Scrambling
The OEM Data Masking is a part of Database Management Pack. Data Scrambling is a part of the Application Management Pack for E-Business suite, a plug-in for the Oracle Enterprise Manager.
Database Scrambling can only be performed when cloning E-Business Suite environments using the Applications Management Pack.
Here’s a detailed comparison of the OEM Data Masking and Applications Management Pack Data Scrambling capabilities:
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