Micro Focus Launches Data Express 4.0

New suite eliminates risk of non-compliance during critical data testing processes and widens data deidentification

NEWBURY, England, 2 April 2009 — Micro Focus® (LSE.MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application management and modernisation solutions, today announced the availability of Micro Focus Data Express 4.0. The new product ensures complete security of existing data during critical data testing processes, eliminating the risk of non-compliance and data leakage. It is also now available for the first time on distributed environments, including Windows, Unix and Linux, in addition to the mainframe.

In response to new requirements and business change, organisations are constantly enhancing enterprise systems. When such changes are implemented it is imperative that existing functionality and high service levels are maintained. The sole way to ensure the reliability of this is through realistic testing with real data.

Using production-derived data presents various challenges to businesses. Firstly, it almost always contains confidential information, such as names, addresses and health or bank records. Although organisations have security in place to protect this in live systems on a day-to-day basis, non-production use, such as testing and training, can result in non-compliance with engineers and external outsourcers having unregulated access to sensitive data. With such a wide number of laws and regulations currently in place (UK Data Protection Act, EU Data Directive, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and the raft of recent data breaches, enterprises are under more pressure than ever to ensure they are robustly protecting their customers’ data and complying with data privacy legislation. The second challenge with using production-derived data for testing is that the volumes are huge, making the testing process slow and unwieldy and inevitably more costly.

Data Express 4.0 addresses both issues through its data masking and data subsetting capabilities. Data masking allows companies to rapidly build automated and repeatable testing processes in order to conceal the data in line with data privacy regulations and eliminate the risk of data breaches. Data subsetting significantly reduces test data size to typically less than 10% of the size of the original, making it more manageable and reducing both data storage costs and the amount of man and elapsed hours spent executing tests. Micro Focus is also launching its Quick Start Methodology, which greatly simplifies the implementation process and allows an enterprise to be up and running on Data Express 4.0 within 20 days.

Stuart McGill, CTO, Micro Focus, said: “The only effective way to ensure your systems are still operating at full capacity after any change to the business is through live testing of existing data. However, with the amount of confidential information stored in IT systems and the current high profile of data breaches, it is essential that organisations do not leave themselves liable to a data leak. Data Express 4.0 ensures the security of organisations’ data, while improving the quality of business applications themselves. Now it is available across both mainframe and contemporary platforms, Data Express 4.0 turns testing into an asset, rather than an impediment, for all types of business.”

In “Data Masking Best Practices”, March 2009, JosephFeiman, research VP and Gartner Fellow states: “Data masking raises enterprises' security and privacy assurance against insiders' abuses and helps enterprises to be compliant with data-centric regulations… [It] is an integral part of software life cycle (SLC) processes.”

About Micro Focus

Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com

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