For enterprise technology professionals tasked with managing data across an entire organization, test data management tools often come in handy. With a test data management solution, IT professionals supervise and administer enterprise architectures, methods and policies to manage the value of company data successfully. In their reviews, IT Central Station users identified data masking, data subsetting and a secure environment as valuable features when selecting test data management solutions for their companies.
CA Test Data Manager, Informatica Test Data Management and IBM InfoSphere Optim Test Data Management are currently ranked as leading test data management tools in the market, according to IT Central Station user reviews.
Here is what our users have to say about working with these solutions, describing which features they find most valuable and offering insight on where they see room for improvement.
CA Test Data Manager
Data masking and anonymizing capabilities
Kamil C., a Senior System Engineer at a communications service provider highlights CA Test Data Manager’s data masking features as highly valuable for his company:
“We have needed a tool where the data provided for developers should be easy and anonymized. This is probably the one and only tool with so many features in it, and is sophisticated in its use. We need those features, as I mentioned for masking/anonymizing data with statistical distribution and with preparation of test/dev data (lots of data).”
Synthetic data generation
For this Quality Assurance professional at a logistics company, synthetic data generation stands out as a particularly beneficial feature:
“One of the most valuable features to us is synthetic data generation. We generate a lot of synthetic data for our performance testing and bulging up our performance environment to see how much load they can sustain. We’ve been doing it for relational data structures. It has really changed the culture in the company because nobody could ever imagine generating millions of records.”
Room for improvement
This IT Manager at a financial services firm writes that CA Test Data Manager can improve certain features of its sub-applications:
“The current version of the product is composed of several sub-applications and the UI screens of those apps are not user-friendly enough. We are expecting that existing products should be merged to a single web-based application supporting HTML5.”
Read more CA Test Data Manager reviews on IT Central Station.
Informatica Test Data Management
Data masking and subsetting
Anirudh N., a Senior ETL Developer at a financial services firm, describes how his company uses Informatica Test Data Management’s masking and subsetting features:
“One of our banking clients didn’t want to give live business data to developers, as it had sensitive information. We had to mask the data using Informatica TDM and leverage its built-in algorithm of seed values.
We also had to create a subset of data that had to be given to different teams. For example, the sales team only needed sales information and didn’t require customer information such as Social Security Numbers. The team working on credit information needed the Social Security Numbers. So we created subsets of data for each team from the master data.”
Maintainability and flexibility
Jijesh J., a Senior Technical Lead, points out that Informatica Test Data Management is flexible and easy to maintain:
“It is an excellent product. It is easily maintainable and flexible. 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.”
Room for improvement
Candido D., an Informatica Solution Architect, notes that the solution’s interface design can improve:
“The interface design needs improvement. Sometimes it’s a bit cumbersome. It could be more uniform with other tools such as analyst, including organization and functionality.”
Read more Informatica Test Data Management reviews on IT Central Station.
IBM InfoSphere Optim Test Data Management
Data subsetting
This IT Leader of Global Technology-Corporate Systems at an insurance company describes how his company subsets its data with IBM InfoSphere Optim Test Data Management:
“Selecting logical slices of data, we can ensure 100 percent data integrity and smaller-size databases. Also, we can pick and choose specific types of data to test and then combine that with data privacy. We have an efficient test bed of data that is optimized for performance, testing criteria, and is PII/PHI compliant.”
Protects sensitive data
Arif K., a Product and Project Manager, highlights IBM InfoSphere Optim Test Data Management’s ability to protect sensitive data as a highly valuable feature:
“Protecting sensitive data in non-production environments. Sensitive data such as national IDs, credit card numbers, email addresses and confidential corporate information can be masked to protect it from misuse and fraud.”
Room for improvement
This Senior Test Analyst at a retailer suggests that improvement be made to IBM InfoSphere Optim Test Data Management’s data masking capabilities:
“Data masking with InfoSphere Optim products creates intermediary extract files and writes the data to persistent storage, which means that extraction, masking, and insertion happen as separate processes, taking more time for the process to run.”
Read more IBM InfoSphere Optim Test Data Management reviews on IT Central Station.
To learn more from what real users have to say about these solutions and others, you can read additional test data management reviews from the IT Central Station community.
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