Produban

About Produban

Produban is Santander Group’s technology company, specializing in the continuous design and operation of IT infrastructures, offering an integral service to its clients. It is a global company, serving over 120 customers, including all banks in the Santander Group, with its 5,500 employees.

Market research showed Micro Focus Data Express as the solution. The Produban team liked the fact that it holds a permanent and centralized knowledge base which gives a summary view of all the data in an environment, synchronized with any updates and changes occurring in the production database. Data subsetting rules within Data Express minimize the effort of setting up a new test environment, while increasing the quality of the environment and the tests.

Héctor Pla Olivé, Deployment and Configuration Manager at Produban: “Using Data Express, we have automated the data masking process. It needs to be practically impossible to reconstruct the masked data, but the data integrity needs to be maintained. So, the same data is always masked using the same algorithm ensuring the same result in any entity. The functional meaning of data has to be same, so names will be masked with a different name, rather than XYZ or 123, and recalculated codes (for instance abbreviated names) must now follow the masked data, e.g. if Jose Sanchez is changed to Juan Perez, his abbreviation JOSAN must now be JUPER. Thanks to the flexibility within the Data Express exit routines, we can mask new test data with very little effort, while still guaranteeing the quality and the security of our test environments.”

Following the Data Express implementation many benefits have been achieved, as explained by Héctor Pla Olivé: “Before our use of Data Express, it would take a week to execute a global refresh of each test environment. This has now been reduced to just one day. We can also add new test data to an existing test environment in just a couple of hours, whereas previously we weren’t able to do this at all.”

Test storage requirements have been reduced by 90% which translates to a fantastic MIPS/ CPU saving and tests are executed much faster too. The test data quality has improved so testing can be much more effective in highlighting issues early on. This results in a significant reduction of issues reported on the production system and higher customer satisfaction.

Lopez Jimenez comments: “This, as well as the elimination of any manual intervention to prepare and reload the data into test environments, has freed up our engineers to concentrate on their core jobs of application development and delivering new functionality to our customers.”

He concludes: