Informatica Test Data Management (TDM) Reviews

The data masking feature has been the most frequently used one. Masking of sensitive production data was my main job.

This product saves time by enabling pretty quick development of data masking/sub-setting the Informatica code.

• Help file: More detailed steps must be added with illustrative screen images
• Administrator support documentation

I have used this product for about two years. I have used it to create data masking solutions for various projects for my clients during the years 2013 and 2014.

We did encounter stability issues. The service component on the Informatica PowerCenter server had unexpected outages, multiple times, at irregular intervals.

Although the PowerCenter host server was up and running, the product was not accessible/usable since the TDM service was down.

There is no client installation available for this product.

This product can only be used on a web browser like Internet Explorer.

The response from Informatica support was nil.

I used the Informatica PowerCenter tools for the manual creation of data masking codes. I switched to this due to its comparatively, lightning fast, code development.

While using this product for development, the initial steps were mostly like hit and miss as the help manual was insufficient. Since the product has a web-based client interface, navigation during the initial couple of days was a pain.

I only did a theoretical comparative study of this product with other products like Grid-Tools, Dataguise, and Camouflage.

This has been created as an add-on to the robust and famous Informatica PowerCenter server. (If the available, internet bandwidth is strong.)

I would like to rate the product as follows:

• Usability/Ease of use (developer): I would give it a rating of 9/10, as it enables quick code development.
• Help file: I would give it a rating of 6/10, as it needs a considerable amount of improvement to be user-friendly.
• Admin control: I would give it a rating of 7/10, since the Informatica admin was unable to start up its service for unknown reasons.

Data masking is the most valuable feature of this product.

I could mask PHI and PII information in my data before sharing it with both the testing teams and the teams that are outside our organization.

If there were some methods to mask data in the cloud, then that would be good.

I have been using this solution for one year.

We have not encountered any stability issues. It is highly stable.

It is highly scalable.

The technical support is excellent.

I have not used another different solution before. This is the first time I am using such a solution.

The initial setup process was straightforward.

It is an excellent product. It is easily maintainable and flexible. The pricing and licensing policy depends upon the budget and compliance needs for the project.

We have not evaluated any other product prior to this solution.

Go ahead and use this product. It is easy for an organization to train the employees with this product.

The product provides four main features:

Data discovery to profile data and mask sensitive data.

Data subsetting to take a subset of production data from all schema tables while preserving referential integrity.

Data masking to create masking rules and mask the fields that we select.

Data generation If we don’t want to mask production data, the tool can generate data based on rules that we configure.

All of the features are strong, however my favorite is data masking. Also, it provides many built-in rules and rules that we can customize to mask all types of data. The masking engine is very strong.

TDM includes built in policy packs, and these are masking and data discovery techniques that are created for common confidential fields like name, Date of Birth, address… Such fields that you can find almost in every database in any company.

The data discovery techniques are regular expressions (RegEx) that are executed on the metadata (the column names) or the data itself to find matches to my discovery.

Example: a data discovery rule with a regular expression set to *name* will find all the fields that include “name” like First_name_EN, full_name_FR… but it will not return the field FN_EN (And I mean by this First Name English)

So if I want to discover all the fileds in my database that might include names I will miss some, since the data discovery rule with RegEx = *name* is very simple and needs to be more complex to cover all columns syntaxes.

I did the implementation for many clients. It is mostly used to mask production data and get values that are realistic but not real. With this, they create development and testing environments with data that looks like it’s real. Developers and UAT will be able to work with such better data sets.

Data discovery and the built in policy packs are very simple; they need stronger ones.

I have been using Informatica since 2012.

I have not encountered stability issues.

I have not encountered scalability issues.

Informatica provides good support for this tool, from knowledge base to tickets for direct support. Any issue is always solved thanks to their support.

I have not used another tool.

To install TDM, you need to install PowerCenter first, which is another Informatica tool. So the installation takes time but it’s always smooth and not that complex.

This is the only product I’ve used.

I recommend it. A very user friendly tool and it’s not mandatory to be technical to use it.