Providing data anonymity

Several scenarios require sensitive user data to be protected and avoid exposure to entities that do not have the right entitlements. It could be Payment Card Industry (PCI) data of credit cards or Protected Health Information (PHI) data from health records, which, in the wrong hands, causes financial and reputational damage. Several data privacy techniques can be used to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) – some trivial and others more complex. The strategy should be carefully considered when you're dealing with large data as there is a performance price to be paid for the additional processing. Other considerations include the need for re-identification, read/write efficiency, the schema, and data format choices. Let's look at some of the strategies that can be used:

• Encrypting data at rest and in motion
• Hashing (for example, using sha512() for ultra-sensitive data such as passwords)
• Tokenization (in the form...