Seguros Lagun Aro is a leading Spanish insurance company committed to putting customers at the center of everything. Their ongoing digital transformation program aims to improve the personalized relationships offered.
The IT team had various databases in use in the development, testing and quality assurance environments. They wanted them to accurately represent the production, while guaranteeing the confidentiality of data.
A method of removing sensitive data from development and test environments using masking, yet keeping the data as realistic as possible so that it looks and behaves in the same way as the original data.
Using Data Masker, the IT team can now provide copies of the production databases to developers, with the sensitive data they contain masked and therefore inaccessible.
Founded in Bilbao, Spain in 1982, Seguros Lagun Aro is a leading insurance company with over 340,000 customers in the Basque Country, Navarra, Castilla León, Aragón, La Rioja, Cantabria, Asturias, Madrid and Barcelona. Offering home, life, auto and house insurance, it is now part of the banking group, Laboral Kutxa.
The company has a commitment to putting customers at the center of everything it does so that they always have a positive experience. As part of that pledge, it has an ongoing digital transformation program to improve the personalized relationship it offers in the provision of its services, whether online or in person.
Given the sensitive and confidential nature of the data it handles, there is also an Information Security Master Plan in place to improve its cybersecurity efforts in the areas of Government, Security, Surveillance and Resilience.
1982Founded340,000Customers
As with many companies, the IT team at Lagun Aro had various databases in use in the development, testing and quality assurance environments. In order for those databases to be of value to the developers, they wanted them to represent the production databases as closely as possible. If they were of a similar size and the data had the same referential integrity and distribution characteristics, for example, testing would identify potential problems long before database changes were released
Those same production databases, however, contained sensitive customer data which would be classified as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) under legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, and which would be under risk from the rising threat of data breaches.
To help resolve the issue, Joseba Bastida, the Systems Manager at Lagun Aro called on BeClever, an IT services company that offers the most advanced information technology solutions. A specialist in solving database challenges in the software delivery process, BeClever was tasked with discovering how the IT team could access the data it needed while also guaranteeing the protection and confidentiality of that data.
The BeClever team has extensive experience in the development of frameworks dedicated to improving data quality processes, including data masking. Data masking is a process that companies use to hide data in order to protect confidential and private information in situations where it might be visible to someone who is not authorized to access it.
The real and sensitive data is either obfuscated or replaced by anonymous data which looks and behaves in the same way as the original data. As a result, developers can still rely on it during testing and development but personal data is also protected in a way that is demonstrably compliant with the GDPR and other legislation.
After looking at various options, BeClever recommended Redgate Data Masker which removes sensitive data from test and development systems, provides realistic data when masking, enables automated masking for future compliance, and is relatively simple to use for non-specialist users.
Using Data Masker, Lagun Aro could strike the right balance between data compliance and the demands from the IT team, ensuring data protection and confidentiality, and also improving the software delivery process.
To ensure Data Masker was configured to meet the particular needs of Lagun Aro, BeClever undertook consultancy work to catalog the sensitive fields the insurance company required. Over three months, they also selected only the most current data to use, in order to reduce the volume of the tables and optimize masking times while maintaining the validity of the data for the teams.
“We have been able to provide agile development environments with truly representative copies of the production database without compromising data privacy.”
Joseba Bastida, Systems Manager
Using Data Masker, Joseba Bastida and the IT team at Lagun Aro can now provide copies of the production databases to developers, with the sensitive data they contain masked and therefore inaccessible.
With data masking in place, Lagun Aro now has the best of both worlds. On the one hand, the IT team has managed to ensure regulatory compliance. On the other, developers can be provided a suitable environment to carry out their work in an agile manner without exposing the personal information of customers. At the same time, it has minimized the risk of data exposure to external attacks.
Importantly, it has not had a detrimental effect on the pace of development. Instead, it has improved both the pace and quality of development, Developers can now have refreshed copies of the production database so that they are testing against the most recent and up-to-date versions, highlighting problems earlier in the pipeline and minimizing errors reaching production.
This has given the wider business assurance that Lagun Aro is now fully compliant with the GDPR, and dramatically reduced the risk of a data breach compromising its customers’ data as well as its reputation.
To ensure this successful outcome is maintained, BeClever continues to provide support for Lagun Aro, helping to mask new fields in the data as they emerge, and satisfying other ongoing privacy and compliance requirements.
Seguros Lagun Aro, a leading insurance company, introduced Data Masker to improve the quality of its database development practices without compromising data privacy.
Seguros Lagun Aro is a leading Spanish insurance company committed to putting customers at the center of everything. Their ongoing digital transformation program aims to improve the personalized relationships offered.
The IT team had various databases in use in the development, testing and quality assurance environments. They wanted them to accurately represent the production, while guaranteeing the confidentiality of data.
A method of removing sensitive data from development and test environments using masking, yet keeping the data as realistic as possible so that it looks and behaves in the same way as the original data.
Using Data Masker, the IT team can now provide copies of the production databases to developers, with the sensitive data they contain masked and therefore inaccessible.
Founded in Bilbao, Spain in 1982, Seguros Lagun Aro is a leading insurance company with over 340,000 customers in the Basque Country, Navarra, Castilla León, Aragón, La Rioja, Cantabria, Asturias, Madrid and Barcelona. Offering home, life, auto and house insurance, it is now part of the banking group, Laboral Kutxa.
The company has a commitment to putting customers at the center of everything it does so that they always have a positive experience. As part of that pledge, it has an ongoing digital transformation program to improve the personalized relationship it offers in the provision of its services, whether online or in person.
Given the sensitive and confidential nature of the data it handles, there is also an Information Security Master Plan in place to improve its cybersecurity efforts in the areas of Government, Security, Surveillance and Resilience.
As with many companies, the IT team at Lagun Aro had various databases in use in the development, testing and quality assurance environments. In order for those databases to be of value to the developers, they wanted them to represent the production databases as closely as possible. If they were of a similar size and the data had the same referential integrity and distribution characteristics, for example, testing would identify potential problems long before database changes were released
Those same production databases, however, contained sensitive customer data which would be classified as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) under legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, and which would be under risk from the rising threat of data breaches.
To help resolve the issue, Joseba Bastida, the Systems Manager at Lagun Aro called on BeClever, an IT services company that offers the most advanced information technology solutions. A specialist in solving database challenges in the software delivery process, BeClever was tasked with discovering how the IT team could access the data it needed while also guaranteeing the protection and confidentiality of that data.
“We have been able to provide agile development environments with truly representative copies of the production database without compromising data privacy.”
Joseba Bastida, Systems Manager
The BeClever team has extensive experience in the development of frameworks dedicated to improving data quality processes, including data masking. Data masking is a process that companies use to hide data in order to protect confidential and private information in situations where it might be visible to someone who is not authorized to access it.
The real and sensitive data is either obfuscated or replaced by anonymous data which looks and behaves in the same way as the original data. As a result, developers can still rely on it during testing and development but personal data is also protected in a way that is demonstrably compliant with the GDPR and other legislation.
After looking at various options, BeClever recommended Redgate Data Masker which removes sensitive data from test and development systems, provides realistic data when masking, enables automated masking for future compliance, and is relatively simple to use for non-specialist users.
Using Data Masker, Lagun Aro could strike the right balance between data compliance and the demands from the IT team, ensuring data protection and confidentiality, and also improving the software delivery process.
To ensure Data Masker was configured to meet the particular needs of Lagun Aro, BeClever undertook consultancy work to catalog the sensitive fields the insurance company required. Over three months, they also selected only the most current data to use, in order to reduce the volume of the tables and optimize masking times while maintaining the validity of the data for the teams.
Using Data Masker, Joseba Bastida and the IT team at Lagun Aro can now provide copies of the production databases to developers, with the sensitive data they contain masked and therefore inaccessible.
With data masking in place, Lagun Aro now has the best of both worlds. On the one hand, the IT team has managed to ensure regulatory compliance. On the other, developers can be provided a suitable environment to carry out their work in an agile manner without exposing the personal information of customers. At the same time, it has minimized the risk of data exposure to external attacks.
Importantly, it has not had a detrimental effect on the pace of development. Instead, it has improved both the pace and quality of development, Developers can now have refreshed copies of the production database so that they are testing against the most recent and up-to-date versions, highlighting problems earlier in the pipeline and minimizing errors reaching production.
This has given the wider business assurance that Lagun Aro is now fully compliant with the GDPR, and dramatically reduced the risk of a data breach compromising its customers’ data as well as its reputation.
To ensure this successful outcome is maintained, BeClever continues to provide support for Lagun Aro, helping to mask new fields in the data as they emerge, and satisfying other ongoing privacy and compliance requirements.
