The university wanted to protect sensitive employee data in non-production environments like development, testing, and training for their PeopleSoft HRMS system. Hexaware used its Akiva data masking tool to de-identify over 34,000 employee records across multiple environments while maintaining system integrity. Akiva completed the masking within the 6 hour window and reduced the training database size by over 60% to lower costs. The university could then securely use realistic test data for various purposes without exposing confidential information.

1. Case Study Enterprise Solutions | PeopleSoft
Top North American Ivy League Leverages Data Masking to desensitize their support environment
Client Overview
North America based top academic and research institution in the world, conducting path breaking research in medicine, science, arts and humanities. It
includes three undergraduate schools, thirteen graduate and professional schools, and a school of continuing education.
Hexaware Approach
Akiva, a product from Hexaware’s innovation lab helped the Chief Security Officer to protect their The Challenge
PII data in their non production environment and subset their data depending upon various
business criteria’s. AKIVA plays a key role in providing realistic data for their development and The University was using PeopleSoft
testing environment and also facilitated in data reduction in their training environment. Akiva is HRMS System which contains their entire
an Application Aware masking tool which is designed to desensitize personal and sensitive data employee’s personal information. Around
required in a variety of situations like software development, implementation and testing. It allows 34,000 active employees’ data were
creation of disguised copies of production databases and provides realistic and fully functional maintained in their system. They wanted to
application without exposing confidentiality. With the help of Security officer and functional desensitize their critical employee informa-
consultant, sensitive elements were identified and masked following environments and tion which includes lecturers, doctors,
performed 3 level of User Acceptance testing researchers, HR and IT staffs in their non
production environment (Training, Develop-
Development Environment ment and Testing). Additionally they were
not able to train their trainees with the
QA Environment
realistic data and were not able to train
Training Environment (Reduced the database size using Data Subsetting and masked the properly in all their modules. Thus, they
environment) wanted to reduce the size of their training
environment by over 60% in order to
Additionally, Hexaware provided consulting to the university on PeopleSoft business processes reduce their server cost and to improve
and database performance tuning. performance. All this had to be done
maintaining the Integrity and consistency of
the system.
Solution Framework
Enhancing Value (Innovative Approach)
Value Delivered
Employee Information were masked with real time lookalike data Client Benefits
Database size in one of the environment was reduced by 60% for training purpose
No impact on existing functionality of
The University had custom tables in their PeopleSoft application where the data came in from application since AKIVA generates
different systems. AKIVA took care of masking all such tables without any customization realistic records and maintains integrity
The window time given to Hexaware to run the masking process was 6 hours and masking Current work flow was not disturbed as
operation completed within 2 and half hours AKIVA completed its operation in the
Performance of the product was increased by DB tuning and parallel processing given window time
Reduces the overhead of implementing
internal security access policies
Technology Environment
High quality data is available for
JAVA, Oracle 10g on UNIX Platform
development, testing and training
Use of data reduction feature helped in
saving disk space and reducing
hardware cost.
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