Oracle announced general availability of Oracle Data Masking Pack, a new offering that helps customers protect sensitive data by replacing confidential or sensitive production information with realistic but scrubbed data based on masking rules. The Oracle Data Masking Pack is generally available today and is priced at $10,000 per CPU of the server where data is being masked. Using bulk masking, the Oracle Data Masking Pack helps dramatically cut down the time needed to implement large-scale masking operations. Additionally, by intelligently masking all related data and automatically enforcing application business rules, the Pack improves IT efficiency and agility while helping reduce the costs and time associated with manual masking processes.

    The Oracle Data Masking Pack is the newest addition to the Oracle Enterprise Manager family of database management packs and further enhances Oracle Enterprise Manager's top-down approach to managing application and IT infrastructure resources. The Oracle Data Masking Pack also enables independent software vendors and developers to develop and maintain Application Masking Templates that define the best-practices for masking application-specific data. This eliminates the need for customers to manually investigate, define and maintain the mask definitions for complex enterprise applications.

    Stacey Halota, Director of Information Security and Privacy, The Washington Post Company noted: "Protecting sensitive information is something that we take very seriously at The Washington Post Company, and data masking is part of our layered defense strategy. Developing masking routines can be a time consuming endeavor, so we are encouraged that data masking will be offered as part of Oracle Enterprise Manager."

    Organizations routinely share production application data, for example, database administrators copy production data into testing environments for realistic and accurate application testing, or businesses share non-specific consumer information with market research organizations. This requires most organizations to mask sensitive parts of its production data. Today, these processes are manual and error-prone and can lead to exposing sensitive data to unauthorized users.

    The Oracle Data Masking Pack enables regulatory compliance through consistent and rule-based application of masking formats across enterprise-wide databases. The Pack supports a rich and extensible format library that can support a variety of mask formats and needs only to be defined once. This helps ensure consistent enforcement of information security policies and allows organizations to share data quickly and scalably without violating privacy regulations.

    "Providing a comprehensive management solution that spans applications, middleware, and database management is the foundation for Oracle Enterprise Manager's top-down approach and with the Oracle Data Masking Pack, companies can now share data within and across company boundaries while addressing regulatory and privacy compliance. Through the Pack's innovative use of templates, which support application-aware masking definitions, customers can achieve greater IT efficiencies while reducing costs," commented Richard Sarwal, senior vice president of Systems Management Products, Oracle.