Data-as-a-Service vendor Delphix has acquired Axis Technology Software in a bid to bolster its security with the company's data masking capability.
The acquisition will enable secure, self-service data delivery for application projects, including ERP rollouts, custom development and migrations to private and public clouds.
Delphix now claims to be the only solution for integrated data masking, data virtualisation and data archiving.
Delphix chief executive, Jed Yueh, said he believed that data masking, the ability to scramble private information such as social security numbers and credit card information, had become a critical requirement for managing data across development, testing, training and reporting environments.
“With Axis, Delphix not only accelerates application projects, but also increases data security for our customers.”
Data masking replaces confidential data such as social security numbers, birthdates and addresses with scrambled data that cannot be used to target customers.
Adding data masking to the Delphix DaaS platform enables IT organisations to eliminate confidential and private information before it reaches developers, QA engineers or other privileged users.
Secure DaaS combines automated data masking, data virtualisation and data archiving into a single solution that delivers data within datacentres and across private and public clouds.
Molina Healthcare, a customer of Delphix and Axis Technology Software, has deployed DaaS across more than 6,000 databases and over 2 petabytes of data in its private cloud.
Molina Healthcare, associate vice president, Enterprise Infrastructure Services, Bharani Krish, said the company relied on Delphix and Axis to help increase agility, reduce costs and meet industry regulations for data protection.
“We expect the combination to better enable our own IT transformation initiatives,” he said.
Axis founder and chief executive, Michael Logan, said his company had built a sophisticated platform to secure customer data, which had been proven at many of the world's biggest banks.
“We’re excited to join Delphix in its mission to transform enterprise data management," he said.
"The integrated power of our platforms will provide our customers the ability to protect their data where and when they need it.”
Logan will take up the role of vice president of data masking at Delphix.
He will be responsible for driving technology synergies and continued market adoption of masking as an addition to the Delphix platform.
451 Research, senior security analyst, Garrett Bekker, said the combination of Delphix DaaS and Axis' data masking brought a new approach to securing application data during development and testing.
"While organisations have relied on data masking as a way to 'de-identify' sensitive information for some time, masking can be a challenge to manage, particularly for large-scale development projects that require numerous copies of a specific database instance," he said.
"By virtualising a ‘golden masked image’ that can be easily replicated or torn down as needed, Delphix can provide a degree of scalability to masking projects that was previously hard to achieve.”
