Working with sensitive data in Oracle databases? Ensuring data privacy and meeting compliance requirements is non-negotiable. Oracle data masking is an essential solution that allows you to protect sensitive data, whether your databases are on-premises or in Oracle Cloud.
Read on to explore Oracle data masking techniques, why they are crucial for compliance, and how to get started.
What is Oracle?
Oracle is a leading provider of on-premises and cloud database solutions (Oracle Cloud), especially for enterprise customers. Many organizations rely on Oracle for housing sensitive data, including personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI).
Data housed in Oracle is subject to global data privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and DORA. Non-compliance with regulations can result in consequences like fines and imprisonment.
What is Oracle Data Masking?
Oracle data masking removes sensitive data by redacting the data, anonymizing it via encryption, or simply deleting data in that column.
Oracle offers native masking capabilities, but they are limited to Oracle systems alone. If you have any other database or files, you need to load the data to Oracle or use Oracle Gateway to access that data from the Oracle database. Enterprises that use multiple databases often benefit from a data masking approach that works across systems.
Data Masking Techniques in Oracle
You can use several data masking techniques in Oracle. Here are some of the most widely used data masking techniques in Oracle by Delphix customers.
In-Place Static Data Masking
Delphix offers in-place static data masking via Continuous Compliance, which is implemented using the Oracle JDBC driver. This driver connects to Oracle and profiles for sensitive data in any table and any column. Once profiled, this data can be masked with fictitious, but realistic data across the entire database.
Some of our customers like to divide the workload. They read the sensitive data from an Oracle database and load the masked data to the non-production database. This is known as on-the-fly masking.
Hyperscale Masking with Oracle SQLLDR
Some of our customers have billions of rows of data they need to mask. They have either massive Oracle ERP environments or large data warehouses. These ERP environments can take weeks to mask and provision.
Masking with Hyperscale Compliance uses bulk readers and writers like Oracle SQLLDR. It also allows unlimited headless masking transformation engines, so you can bring as much computing as you like to the masking task. Thus, you can reach masking speeds of two billion rows/hour, masking terabytes of data in the process.
When combined with Continuous Data, you can virtualize and provision databases in minutes — with 1/100th the storage size.
Why is Oracle Data Masking Important?
Oracle was one of the top two data sources in need of protection, according to the 2024 State of Data Compliance and Security Report. I find that most enterprises have Oracle OLTP environment often with customer master data or ERP data.
Protecting the data in Oracle databases will only become more important as data grows. 75% reported that the volume of sensitive data stored in non-production environments increased over the past year. And 91% reported concerns about the resulting expanded exposure footprint.
At the same time, 86% allowed compliance exceptions in non-production environments. So, it’s not a surprise that 54% experienced data breaches or theft and that 43% experienced regulatory non-compliance.
Here at Delphix, we believe it is vital to protect sensitive data in non-production environments, and that masking is the best way to do so.
The State of Data Compliance and Security Report
Find out what 250 enterprise leaders are doing to protect sensitive data in non-production environments. Get your copy of the report now.
In my experience working with Delphix customers, Oracle data masking forms a large percentage of their data risk. Furthermore, these customers want to consistently mask their Oracle data with other data sources, such as OLTP or OLAP databases, mainframe, and cloud PaaS data sources.
Discover more >> What Is Delphix?
An Oracle Data Masking Example with Delphix
Here’s an Oracle data masking example we saw with one customer, SelectHealth. They had data residing in a variety of data sources, including Oracle. But they had no standard or consistent way of delivering data due to data heterogeneity and sensitivity. Only a limited number of applications and portals could be developed internally since they needed to connect to the central processing system.
The Delphix DevOps Data Platform virtualized SelectHealth’s different data sources (including Oracle) and enabled them to provide custom data environment copies to their developers. With built-in masking as part of the platform, the IT team is now able to deliver developers and partners access to data within minutes, while upholding data privacy and security standards.
By using Delphix for Oracle data masking, SelectHealth increased partner engagement by 10x, accelerated data provisioning times from 4-5 days to 10 minutes, and created an unlimited number of custom data environments.
“The most important benefit of Delphix for us is time, getting things done faster, in minutes, instead of days, and enabling partners globally,” says John Tippetts, Director, Application Development and IT Infrastructure, SelectHealth.
Why Delphix is the Ideal Oracle Data Masking Solution
The Delphix Difference for Oracle Data Masking
Delphix offers several benefits for Oracle data masking compared to other options:
- Fast Access and Compatibility: Delphix natively leverages Oracle’s row IDs. This provides fast access to any row in a database, even if the table doesn’t have a primary key or indices.
- Support for XML and JSON: Get support for saving XML & JSON data types as a string of data inside CLOB and BLOB data types. Delphix natively handles all of these data types. Plus, Delphix can further mask specific attributes inside the XML and JSON data structures consistently with any other column in Oracle.
- Oracle Cloud Masking: Delphix does Oracle Cloud data masking for downstream datasets for development and test environments using the same fictitious values (with referential integrity) that you use to mask in other clouds and on-premises environments.
- Masking Plus Virtualization: When you combine data virtualization with Oracle data masking, Delphix can use selective data distribution to replicate masked datasets from on-premises to Oracle Cloud and vice versa with no risk of reversibility.
- Masking Across Oracle Products: Delphix can mask any Oracle product including Exadata.
- Support for On-Premises or Cloud: Delphix can consistently mask data in a hybrid fashion for any data source on-premises as well as Oracle cloud or any other public cloud.
The Delphix Advantage: More Than Oracle Data Masking
Oracle isn’t the only database in large enterprises. Most businesses we work with have a combination of OLTP and OLAP databases, mainframe, SQL, and PaaS databases — plus other data sources.
While Oracle masking is native, these customers can’t have datasets that are completely different across their data sources. The data also reside across on-premises and public cloud vendors.
Delphix masking solutions are policy-based: you deploy your sensitive data policy to any data source on-premises AND on Oracle Cloud — or through other public cloud vendors. Thus, you can achieve consistent data risk protection.
Delphix can replicate incremental masked changes from production to non-production environments with Continuous Data. This means you can create zero trust in non-production environments; the sensitive data never persists in lower/non-production environments.
With a combination of Continuous Data and Continuous Compliance, you can eliminate data risk and reduce provisioning time for large Oracle databases from a few weeks to hours.
Our solution effectively scales from the smallest Oracle server to massive billion rows of analytical sources (like Snowflake and Databricks) to deliver secure data rapidly and automatically to downstream teams — when and where they need it — to shift left and improve quality.
Get Started
Are you ready to take your Oracle data masking to the next level?
With Delphix you can achieve data compliance while accelerating the speed and quality of software development and analytics initiatives. No need to make trade-offs.
Our team of experts is here to help you with data masking and compliance, for Oracle and beyond. Get a no-pressure demo from one of our product specialists and see how Delphix can help your organization achieve superior data masking.