12:00 pm - 1:00 pm - Lunch and Networking 1:00 pm - 1:15 pm - Updates and Announcements 1:15 pm - 4:00 pm - Data Masking Speaker : Tim Gorman, Delphyx Data security is in the news every week now. Recently, an analytics consulting firm breached data for thousands of patients when an employee succumbed to a phishing attack. Years ago, hackers attacked a major retailer's non-production environments copied from production and harvested data on millions of customers. What each incident has in common is that confidential data was being shared internally where it shouldn't have been. For decades, IT has been negligent, using production data for software development and testing, exposing sensitive data to those without need or authorization to access it. This decades-old practice must end. Data masking is the solution for providing non-production environments and analytic data sets with realistic (but non-confidential) data, thus reducing the surface area of risk for breaching data. The alternative, generating test data, incurs classic problems of engineering bias as well as blindness to true-to-life data scenarios which arise in the "wild". Masking real production data retains realistic data conditions and distributions while merely obfuscating real data. Upshot: data masking is likely to become a new legal requirement, so don't let this catch your organization unaware and flat-footed. Masking is important, and sophisticated software packages are available today, but the field is new enough that there is lots of room for improvement in all of them. This affects everyone in IT, so come and learn about it.