IRI brings big database protection technologies to Eclipse

Issued by Global Research Partners for SPI Group
Johannesburg, 13 May 2013

SPI, the African distributor for utility software products and services to the open systems segment of the IT industry and the sole sub-Saharan Africa distributor for USA-based Innovative Routines, a leading developer of big data transformation and data-centric protection software, today announced major new versions of its products for securing personally identifying information in databases and files, and rapidly generating safe, intelligent test data for entire databases, files and reports.

The respective FieldShield and RowGen v3 upgrades include major functional enhancements, and full support in the IRI Workbench graphical IDE, built on Eclipse.

FieldShield v3 can automatically apply security measures to database columns containing common personally identifiable information (PII) in multiple tables. According to IRI technical director Rob Howard, FieldShield's new data protection rule engine and function library "allow users to specify, save and re-use protections that apply only to column names matched through regular expressions. Protecting multiple columns at once saves job design time and preserves referential integrity during data protection."

The new FieldShield release delivers protections in 10 functional categories, and includes these new methods:

* FIPS-compliant OpenSSL and 3DES encryption
* AES-128 (in addition to AES-256 with or without format preservation)
* Random selection or data generation
* 256-bit hashing
* Custom data masks
* Record reformatting

See also

SPI announces IRI's RowGen v3

Tyco International gains the ability to automate 600 000+ documents annually via Esker

RowGen v3 automates the creation of structurally and referentially correct database test data in a new job wizard in the IRI Workbench GUI. The wizard consolidates the tasks of:

* Parsing, where table descriptions and integrity constraints are translated to test data generation definitions that reflect the source structures, column data types and dependent sets.
* Generation, where pre-sorted flat files containing the test data are created for loads, and the definitions remain for modification and re-use.
* Population, where target tables are rapidly bulk-loaded in the order necessary to maintain the same table relationships that exist in production.

RowGen v3 also features new test data customisation and value range distribution features, which, according to Howard, "provide complete realism for every column without personally identifying anyone".

For further information, please contact Chris Anderson at tel (+27) 11 234 1560; fax (+27) 11 234 1387; e-mail chris@spi.co.za.

IRI, The CoSort Company

Founded in 1978, Innovative Routines International (IRI) is an independent software vendor headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, with licensing and support offices in more than 30 cities worldwide. IRI's flagship package, CoSort, manipulates big data, migrates legacy sorts, and can replace SQL, shell, ETL and 3GL programs. CoSort-compatible tools include FACT (Fast Extract), FieldShield (data masking), NextForm (data conversion) and RowGen (test data).

SPI

SPI is a company that provides utility software products and services to the open systems segment of the IT industry. It is the sole sub-Saharan Africa distributor for USA-based FacetCorp; USA-based Innovative Routines; USA-based Help/Systems, the new owner of Open Systems Management; Privileged User Manager from Australia-based Applecross Technologies; France-based Esker; and UK-based Xi Software. SPI also develops some of its own software utilities to complement the overseas products it distributes.

SPI has a wide and varied customer base and includes organisations such as Aspen Pharmacare, Johannesburg Municipality, University of Johannesburg, Metropolitan Health Group, Nampak, National Brands, Stellenbosch University, UCT and Unisa.

Editorial contacts