I named Informatica one of the top 21 vendors to see at the RSA Conference that was held last month in San Francisco.
Informatica has been around for a while, but this is the first time the company has exhibited at RSA Conference. The main reason they showed up this year was to show off a new addition to Informatica’s product line called Dynamic Data Masking. As explained to me by Adam Wilson, Senior Vice-President & General Manager at Informatica, Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) integrates into an existing data environment, intercepts data in motion, checks user authorization levels and then displays or masks data according to a business defined policy while logging all activity for audit purposes.
The example that Wilson used to illustrate product operation was a customer service center that used DDM to block first line call center representatives from accessing celebrity data.
Much of what Wilson described sounded like what data loss prevention tools have been doing for some time. The secret sauce that Informatica brings to the table is track record of successfully picking up data, transforming it and then landing the useful–but in its transformed state–valueless data in test and development environments.
DDM came to Informatica when the company acquired ActiveBase in July 2011.