Data Masking

Data masking (also called data obfuscation or anonymization) is the process of replacing sensitive data with realistic but fictitious values. This protects personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, health records, and other sensitive information while preserving the data's format and usability for development, testing, and analytics. Types include static masking (permanently replaces data in a copy), dynamic masking (obscures data at query time based on user permissions), and tokenization (replaces sensitive values with tokens that can be reversed with a secure lookup). Common masking techniques include substitution, shuffling, encryption, nulling out, and format-preserving transformation.