Selected Questions and Answers
Important note: The FAQs below are not a comprehensive resource, and only address a fraction of the available capabilities in IRI software or questions people ask.
Please visit the IRI solutions and products sections to learn more. Also, do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, or need details on specific features or options applicable to your use case(s).
Which protection techniques can I use? What should I use?
Whichever satisfies your business requirements. In IRI FieldShield (or the SortCL program in IRI CoSort), you can apply any of these techniques on a per-field/column basis:
- Encryption
- Masking
- Hashing
- Pseudonymization
- Randomization
- De-ID
- Expression (calculation/function) logic
- Substring and byte shifting
- Data type conversion
- Custom function
The decision criteria for which protection function to use for each datum are:
- Security - how strong (uncrackable) must the function be
- Reversability - whether that which was concealed must later be revealed
- Performance - how much computational overhead is associated with the algorithm
- Appearance - whether the data must retain its original format after being protected
IRI is happy to help you assess which functions best apply to your data.
Note also that you can protect one or more fields with the same or different functions, or protect one or more records entirely ("wholerec"). In each case, the condition criteria and targets/layout parameters can also be customized, and combined with data transformation and reporting in the same job. And, in fit-for-purpose multi-table wizards, or through global data classification, DBAs and data stewards can apply these protections as rules to preserve consistency and referential integrity database or enterprise wide.
