Using live data outside production is one of the fastest ways to create compliance risk, because it quickly becomes harder to control who can access it, how it is handled, and how long it is kept. A Test Data Management (TDM) approach provides exactly the kind of controls SOC 2 auditors look for in this situation: an automated, traceable end-to-end process for protecting, provisioning, and removing customer data so it can be used safely in non-production environments. Read more
How do we protect sensitive data and still get realistic test databases without creating a masking process that is slow, brittle, or impossible to maintain? This article sets out five practical ways that Redgate Test Data Manager helps teams deliver secure, realistic test data reliably. Read more
With simple integration, SCOM and Redgate Monitor combine breadth and depth, infrastructure-wide observability plus SQL Server insight. The result is faster incident response, smarter use of DBA time, and monitoring that scales with growth and new technologies. Read more
Phil Factor shares some of the common ways database deployments go wrong, and the testing strategies and sanity checks that will stop them happening to you. Read more
This article explores dynamic alerting, what it means, why it matters for DBAs, and how it works in Redgate Monitor. Learn how machine learning-driven thresholds increase alert relevance, helping teams focus on real performance issues while saving DBAs time. Read more
Managing database security, compliance, and performance across a complex estate is no easy task. Redgate Monitor Enterprise brings all the data you need into one place. This article explores how it helps DBAs track user permissions, ensure configuration compliance, create custom reports, and implement resilient high-availability monitoring. Read more
Redgate Test Data Manager is designed to provide secure, anonymized, and representative copies of production databases. This article focuses on the role of deterministic data masking, transforming PII consistently across tables, even when no logical relationship exists between them, and explains how it works. Read more
This article illustrates the importance in any database development project of a 'multi-layered' approach to database access controls and security checks, based on the Principle of Least Privilege. It describes a security incident that was raised when databases related to a local development project were found to have been erroneously deployed to a remote test server. It explains the nature of the incident, what went wrong that allowed it to happen, and the measures that were put in place to prevent its recurrence. Read more
This is the first of two articles to describe the principles and practicalities of masking data in databases. It explains why an organization sometimes needs masked data, the various forms of masked data we can use, the sort of data that needs to be masked, and the potential pitfalls. Read more
This article takes a strategic look at common data masking and anonymization techniques, and the challenges inherent in protecting certain types of sensitive and personal data, while ensuring that it still looks like the real data, and retains its referential integrity, and distribution characteristics. It also explains, briefly, with references, the tools that one can use to mask different types of data and how to provision development and test machines with these 'de-sensitized' databases, or alternatively to produce fake data that looks like the real thing, but in fact is generated randomly. Read more
