IRI strengthens data masking for FieldShield and DarkShield

Innovative Routines International (IRI), a provider of big data management and data-centric security, is releasing new versions of its core data masking software for privacy law compliance, breach nullification, and test data provisioning. Specifically, IRI FieldShield and DarkShield can now profile and protect personally identifiable information (PII) in more data sources and silos.

FieldShield 5 adds support for Excel, allowing data masking to and from spreadsheets, and between other structured sources like database tables and flat files.

FieldShield 5 also integrates with Azure Key Vault and Townsend Alliance Key Manager to handle encryption keys.

Additionally, the data profiling and search wizards in the IRI Workbench development environment for FieldShield now display interactive dashboards that meaningfully represent PII values and locations.

DarkShield 4 adds support for simultaneous data searching and masking in relational and NoSQL databases, including Hive, MongoDB, Oracle 19c, Snowflake, and Elasticsearch.

According to IRI CTO Don Purnhagen, "DarkShield can locate and mask PII found in complex key-value pairs and arrays, free-form text, and embedded documents or images in RDB columns or NoSQL collections." Either FieldShield or DarkShield can be used for atomic, structured column values.

Because FieldShield and DarkShield share common data classes and masking functions, they can be used interchangeably to consistently mask, and optionally reveal data in multiple data sources. Their search results can also be exported to SIEM tools like Splunk Enterprise Security.

Finally, DarkShield now offers a "RESTful" Application Programming Interface (API) built on a web services layer.

The API, which can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud, can perform search and masking operations "as a service" on unstructured text and files received from third-party programs.

For more information about these updates, visit www.iri.com.