Businesses that deal with customer data have to make sure that the PII (personally identifiable information) of these customers is not moving freely around the entire data pipeline. This criterion is applicable not only to customer data but also to any other type of data that is considered classified, as per standards such as GDPR, SOX, and so on. In order to make sure that we protect the privacy of customers, employees, contractors, and vendors, we need to take the necessary precautions to ensure that when the data goes through several pipelines, users of the data see only anonymized data. The level of anonymization we do depends upon the standards the company adheres to and also the prevailing country standards.
So, data masking can be called the process of hiding/transforming portions of original data with other data without losing the meaning or context.
In this...