An organization wants to give a development contractor a copy of its customer database for testing, but company policy forbids exposing any personally identifiable information. The contractor's scripts expect the same column formats and referential relationships to keep working. Which data-protection process should the data engineer apply so the values appear fake yet the schema and look-and-feel of the data remain intact?
Data masking irreversibly substitutes realistic-looking values for the original sensitive entries while leaving the data type, length, and relational structure unchanged, so existing queries run without modification. Encryption converts the entire dataset into unreadable ciphertext that can be reversed only with a key, which would not satisfy the contractor's need to run queries. Archiving is simply long-term storage and does not hide PII. Tokenization replaces sensitive values with stand-in tokens that usually require a look-up vault to retrieve the real data, so the original information is still recoverable-unlike masking.
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