A server administrator is tasked with providing a development team with a copy of the production database for testing purposes. To mitigate the risk of exposing customer data and comply with privacy regulations, the administrator must ensure that no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is visible to the developers. Which of the following mitigation strategies should be applied to the copied dataset?
The correct answer is data masking. Data masking, also known as data obfuscation, is the process of replacing sensitive, real data with realistic but fictional data. This is the most appropriate technique in this scenario because it allows the development team to work with a dataset that has the same structure and characteristics as the production data without exposing actual PII.
Data encryption at rest protects data stored on a disk from being read by unauthorized users. However, for the developers to use the data, it would need to be decrypted, which would expose the PII.
Role-based access control (RBAC) is a method of restricting network access based on the roles of individual users within an enterprise. While important, RBAC would grant the developers access to the data but would not protect the sensitive PII within the dataset itself from being viewed by them.
Data loss prevention (DLP) is a set of tools and processes used to ensure that sensitive data is not lost, misused, or accessed by unauthorized users. DLP solutions are primarily focused on preventing data exfiltration from the network, not on altering data for use in non-production environments like testing.