Leveraging production refreshes

Sometimes, the work isn’t user-interface-driven at all. Data processing groups often create reports or transactions (such as processing an insurance claim), or simply move data from one system to another, including ETL work. Insurance companies, banks, ERP software developers, and survey companies have this as their main business. Anyone doing fraud detection, distilling data, or carrying out data mining may also do this sort of work.

In that case, the company may want to simulate the production environment by copying data for the live server. Typically, this is done on some sort of schedule, such as every quarter, or with some slice of live data. This ensures the team is looking at the actual data, often in massive volumes.

Then again, imagine having a private medical issue and realizing that someone at your company in testing might be looking at your data. Or even someone viewing your bank account information or your credit score. In recent...