Delphix: Test Match

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Data powers the world — Delphix keeps that data safe

Today, all companies are data companies, regardless of the products they make or the services they provide. Consumers have become increasingly accustomed to personalization in everything from advertising to healthcare and expect a quality, tailored user experience in applications and on the internet.

In the race to stay competitive, businesses are hyper-focused on innovating at every turn. That need for speed, however, can put consumer data privacy at risk. Executives at companies want to protect sensitive data but often have blind spots that can result in devastating breaches.

Jedidiah Yueh

“Companies don’t often think about the cost of innovation,” said Jedidiah Yueh, founder and CEO of Delphix. “For instance, they often fail to secure the data in development and test environments, which can be accessed by administrators, developers, analysts, partners, and contractors. That’s a big surface area of risk.”

IT teams often secure production applications against data leaks, but also need data to develop and test the next software release or upgrade. Companies often have data in three to 10 downstream environments for every production application to support innovation and data science or analytics.

“Most companies leave it up to individual application teams to take responsibility for their innovation data, which results in varying degrees of risk and vulnerability — a Swiss cheese approach to security. That’s why there’s a constant stream of high-profile breaches in the news. This is where platforms like ours step in,” Yueh said.

The Delphix DevOps test data management platform enables companies to accelerate innovation while securing sensitive and personally identifiable information. Delphix customers modernize applications, adopt multi-cloud, increase development speed, and recover from downtime events such as ransomware up to two times faster than others.

The platform keeps data safe while allowing companies to accelerate the cadence of product releases to keep on top of their business goals. “DevOps is all about automating the path of innovation so that you can release the next version of software faster and faster over time,” he explained.

In DevOps, tech companies employ continuous integration and continuous delivery and deployment pipelines (CI/CD) to automate innovation. As Yueh put it, “Some of the tech giants who use our platform are releasing software at millions of CI/CD pipeline runs per month. Their rate of innovation is truly incredible.”

That’s in contrast to the waterfall strategy of software development, in which companies release new iterations as slowly as once a year. Companies that still embrace that mindset face incredible disadvantages compared to firms that recognize the importance of DevOps.

As a result, the new standard for innovation has become millions of releases per month. “That's the pace set by the world's fastest-growing and largest revenue-generating companies,” said Yueh, stressing that the rest of the world needs to play catch-up. “Many companies don’t realize how far behind they are compared to world-class rates of innovation.”

Companies lagging on the innovation curve may trail their peers for any number of reasons. While they may be aware of examples of staggering software release rates, they look at their legacy systems, processes, and expertise to justify their current pace.

“They're satisfied with incremental improvements, when they really need a huge mindset shift. They need to commit to a world-class rate of innovation and do everything they can to achieve it.”

Passing the tests

Testing is a critical aspect of software development. New versions must be tested to make sure they work as they should prior to going live. Testing takes place in an application environment that has all the components of the production environment, such as software, application servers, database servers, storage, networking, and, of course, the data.

As Yueh put it, “That's where Delphix delivers. We automate the delivery of data into these application environments so that you can test your next release quickly.”

The Delphix DevOps Data Platform automates the delivery of data at high speeds and scale, giving their customers the ability to run millions of software releases in a month. It also automates the discovery and masking of sensitive data in compliance with consumer privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA.

When personally identifiable information is discovered, the platform replaces it or masks it with synthetic values before delivering the test data. This prevents developers, analysts, contractors, or partners that may have access to test environments from stealing sensitive data and creating a consumer data privacy breach. The Delphix platform ensures that data is secure and compliant for all new software releases.

The Delphix platform also ameliorates the risks that exist in the data chain of custody. In many companies, administrators who have access to data will move it from the production environment into another environment where a development team uses the data. “It’s much more secure to use a platform that automates everything end to end and ensures nobody can see or touch consumer privacy data,” he said.

Delphix works across the multicloud, which includes applications that are run in platform-as-a-service or infrastructure-as-a-service offerings in major public clouds. The software is compatible with applications dating back to when mainframes were the name of the game through to today's big software-as-a-service platforms, such as Salesforce and Workday. “Delphix works across the entire span of enterprise applications,” he noted.

Given its ability to solve the precarious innovation-privacy paradox, Delphix is unique in the market. “If a new company were to try to enter the market, it would be really formidable for them to cover the wingspan that we have in the product, supporting mainframes all the way out to SaaS and PaaS,” he added. “It's a lot of generations of application architectures to cover.”

Many of the world's biggest banks, insurance and tech companies are Delphix devotees. If you bank with any of the major banks or use any of the major insurance companies' products, chances are they are using the platform to protect your consumer data. The platform enables innovation and protects consumer data privacy from exposure on the dark web, ransomware gangs, and other cybercriminal attacks.

Sustainability is also a core component of the Delphix platform. Its high degree of efficiency reduces the environmental impact of data and application environments by 10 to 20 times, while also reducing IT costs. “We are very good for the environment wherever you deploy us,” Yueh asserted.

Sustainability has three pillars: environmental, societal, and governance (ESG). Delphix also has a big role in governance. Staying in compliance with regulations protecting consumer data privacy can be challenging, as more countries, states, and territories pass their own privacy laws.

Some may adopt the principles of GDPR, but it’s far from a global standard. As the protector of consumer data privacy for many of the largest organizations in the world, Delphix has an outsized role in ESG.

Yueh’s firm recently launched SustainableIT.org. The nonprofit partners with technology leaders from many of the world's biggest companies to drive sustainability as a key part of their agenda through technology and technology leadership.