Perforce Delphix Continuous Compliance for Data Masking on AWS

In my projects, I have used Perforce Delphix  mainly for masking and virtualization purposes. I have used the Perforce Delphix  virtualization engine to provision virtual VDBs for end-users from different sources such as Oracle, MySQL , and DB2 , ingesting them into the Perforce Delphix virtual database engine.

Perforce Delphix's best features are the ease of use and the ease of understanding the entire environment. It is a very user-friendly engine for both the virtualization and the masking engine. It can be easily handled and even beginners can utilize this space to mask and secure their data.

Perforce Delphix has helped in reducing refresh times by approximately 20 to 30%, or the wait time for provisioning fresh data. Without virtualization, if I have to depend on DBAs to perform refresh, Perforce Delphix has helped reduce that wait time. In case of any required refreshes, the end users could easily do it from the virtualization engine to perform a data refresh or acquire fresh data from the source. With the help of Perforce Delphix and the Perforce Delphix self-service capability, I was able to provide this service to the development or UAT team to provision their own data and access their own data at their own convenience. They can perform the refreshes, rewind, and perform their testing. Perforce Delphix has made a huge impact in my projects in terms of time saving.

I could see faster deliveries with Perforce Delphix. There was improvement in how the testing was performed because when the team needed to have refreshed the data or rewind to a particular space and time in the timeline, they could do it themselves. They did not need to depend on any DBAs or the TDM team to do it for them. With their own convenience, they were able to perform their testing and give valuable test results. Perforce Delphix self-service has been quite useful in this regard.

A challenging aspect would be when I have any customized algorithm requirement with Perforce Delphix. If the data is unique and cannot be masked using the Perforce Delphix built-in algorithms, creating customized algorithms as per the requirement becomes difficult. A few challenges I faced were having consistent masked address data, such as address line one, address line two, city, state, and zip code remaining consistent after masking in case the data goes through an address validator. That is one of the challenges I faced.

Perforce Delphix has, over the last five years, come a long way. In my experience, there have been many upgrades and version updates. Perforce Delphix has been growing consistently. Another thing that Perforce Delphix could probably add is synthetic data generation. That is one thing many companies require because some companies do not have access to production data or are not allowed to use production data. If along with virtualization, Perforce Delphix's virtualization and masking capabilities, synthetic data generation could be added, it could be a comprehensive package and would help organizations that want to use a hybrid form of securing data. That would be helpful, including synthetic data generation.

Synthetic data generation would help organizations that want to use a hybrid form of securing data, including virtualization, masking, and synthetic data generation wherever data is not available. That would help Perforce Delphix to be a complete package for test data management activities. If Perforce Delphix could also include the ability to generate synthetic data, it would be a complete package and can be utilized in organizations.

I have been using Perforce Delphix for the last five years.

Perforce Delphix product support is very good. They provide training, and once they gave us the training, new users, even up to a junior level engineer, could easily adapt to the environment and easily start working and producing results. That is how helpful Perforce Delphix is to secure production data.

I do not recall using a different solution in my previous organization. It was initially around 2021, and I was new to Perforce Delphix, so I do not recall what solution was used then. It was probably on-premises.

Some other options were evaluated, but I was not a part of that evaluation. Probably Informatica TDM  and Broadcom were considered. Perforce Delphix was chosen out of those options.

Regarding Perforce Delphix's governance and security, it is good. It uses proper profiling sets to identify the PIIs or PHIs, whichever are sensitive data. It is also customizable, and Perforce Delphix offers that ability too. I can customize how the data can be identified. That is positive.

Accuracy regarding Perforce Delphix depends on the applications, the type of data, or the type of metadata that each source data comes in as. Accuracy, from what I have seen, is around 80 to 85%. The rest of the 15% is what I still do manually. I analyze and check if I missed any sensitive data. I still do some manual assessment. An accuracy of 80 to 85% is good.

I would rate this review an 8 overall.

My main use case for Perforce Delphix  in my previous organization involved two concerns: we had a huge production database that needed replication for non-production environments with real-time data use cases, addressing both the large amount of data and storage issues, which Perforce Delphix  helped us with significantly.

One specific project where Perforce Delphix helped with the huge amount of data and storage issues involved replicating large production data for non-production use to run our automated and manual test cases. We created a Perforce Delphix environment to replicate data, allowing us to create multiple non-production environments with the same storage set, where we were running different test cases in parallel, improving performance, coverage, and turnaround time significantly. Additionally, we were able to spin up environments very quickly.

Another important aspect we utilized with Perforce Delphix was point-in-time snapshotting, which allowed us to roll back all changes and restore the original state of the replicated data, thus contributing to its effective use.

Perforce Delphix offers excellent features including a very good UI capability and strong performance, along with reliable connection functionalities.

Regarding the UI, I found it to be very fast and performant from the database side, allowing us to create environments without the need for backend scripts. The UI also provided ways to connect to the database and observe current database usage statistics.

Perforce Delphix has positively impacted my organization by significantly improving turnaround time for test cycles, enabling us to close feature set testing very quickly and enhancing development time due to the availability of real-time data for executing numerous use cases in a non-production environment.

I estimate that our test cycle time has increased by forty to fifty percent and parallel development has had a significant impact as well.

In terms of improvements for Perforce Delphix, I believe the pricing page should provide more flexibility, as it was costlier before, though I am uncertain about the current pricing structure.

I have been working in my current field for the last eight years, and I have around twenty years of total experience.

Perforce Delphix is stable.

I did not encounter any scalability issues with what I have used, though I am uncertain about its overall scalability.

The customer support for Perforce Delphix is good. I would rate the customer support around seven to eight.

Previously, we were replicating using native database replication, but we switched to Perforce Delphix because we were struggling with data synchronization and storage issues.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Perforce Delphix.

My advice for others considering Perforce Delphix is that if you are dealing with production database validation or related use cases and struggling with database storage, size, and pricing, Perforce Delphix is a good option. Especially for large organizations where multiple teams are working on the same data set and there are multiple features being released, Perforce Delphix offers a solid solution for logical data separation.

I am not using Perforce Delphix right now, but I was using it in my previous organization for one year.

I am uncertain about Perforce Delphix's AI capabilities, particularly concerning governance and security, as I have not worked much in that area.

Regarding the accuracy and reliability of Perforce Delphix's AI output, I have not had any experience with that and might need to explore it further.

I would rate this review an eight overall.

My main use case for Perforce Delphix  is service virtualization and data masking.

I started with data masking first; Perforce Delphix  is used for static data masking, not dynamic. I used it for our New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 compliance across the non-production environments, and we deployed it with 80% of the stack running on Perforce Delphix data masking capability. On the virtualization side, we deployed virtual VDBs based on Oracle, SQL Server , MySQL , and Postgres.

Perforce Delphix has a data control tower, which is their admin product through which you can do the provisioning of the VDBs from one dashboard across all engine deployments; we had multiple engines of virtualization and the masking engine, allowing us to have one view of the whole infrastructure sitting at that one product. They have developed this product quite nicely because previously it was just for reporting, but now it has many capabilities including virtual engine, virtual VDBs provisioning, masking, and doing many other things all from one dashboard.

There was quite a push for auto intelligence AI in our system, and due to the automation we built over three to three and a half years ago, we really improved the data landscape with Perforce Delphix, saving a lot of time and allowing the teams to focus on more productive tasks rather than just on that; 80% of our stack was running on Perforce Delphix APIs which was brilliant.

Perforce Delphix has positively impacted our organization by reducing the time it takes to do non-production environment data refreshes from weeks to hours, which has saved a lot of time for the teams; we were completely agile from top to bottom, enabling us to deliver quick turnaround and significant benefits to our teams, delivering value to the business—it was an excellent investment.

From weeks of data refreshes, we've gone down to days, allowing us to refresh seven environments in just three days, which is a huge achievement, reducing the previous time almost 80% from seven days or weeks to just a couple of days.

There are still some areas in Perforce Delphix needing improvement, particularly in the data quality aspects, which I provided feedback on during my time using Perforce Delphix; products like Collibra or Informatica are leaders in data quality, covering six dimensions including accuracy and completeness, which are missing in Perforce Delphix. Although it was good for automation and agility, the lack of data quality features is a significant gap.

User experience in Perforce Delphix has improved quite a bit from previous years, making it easier for individuals with just a couple of years of experience to work with it. However, when refreshing production systems, the ability to selectively refresh at a schema level instead of the whole environment is a feature that needs improvement.

I chose an eight because of the gaps mentioned, particularly around data quality, which is critical in the AI world; top-quality data is essential for effective AI learning models, and that improvement is necessary, as well as enhancements in refreshing environments to allow for more selective updates rather than complete refreshes.

The accuracy and reliability of output from Perforce Delphix depend on the quality of the source environment; if the environment does not meet quality standards, Perforce Delphix cannot perform optimally, which is why I emphasize the need for improvement in data quality.

I have been using Perforce Delphix for the last ten years.

Scalability with Perforce Delphix is excellent; we never had issues while implementing service virtualization and masking, as it can easily run on new infrastructure and quickly spin up new VMs for deployment.

Customer support from Perforce Delphix stands out as one of the best; my experience with their highly technical and professional support team has been amazing.

Before adopting Perforce Delphix, we used a product called IBM Optum, but it did not cover enough functionality for our needs due to its specialized implementation.

We evaluated other options, including IBM Optum, TCM (Test Director Manager), and Perforce Delphix itself; after workshops and proofs of concept, we decided on Perforce Delphix because it offered modern features including Perforce Delphix Self-Service, known as JetStream, allowing developers to perform their own refreshes and use bookmarks and branching without needing DBAs.

At the company I used to work, we had these three products that have been used for over ten years, so they definitely have many nice features, as I explained, including VDB virtualization and mapping really large data sets in production into a very small storage footprint that helps to build our capability in non-production environments; Perforce Delphix is also used for functional testing, static masking, and engine-based masking or outside the engine databases that can be masked as well.

Perforce Delphix AI capabilities include the introduction of the MCP server in its newer version, which enhances the masking capabilities and reduces the burden on users to come up with their own algorithms; this feature is excellent for speeding up processes.

In my organization, we had an on-premises deployment of Perforce Delphix.

When looking into using Perforce Delphix, potential users need to understand its capabilities; it is excellent for static masking but lacks dynamic masking, which is crucial for some use cases. It also provides robust integration options, but the choice between on-prem and cloud solutions should align with the user's specific requirements for maximizing benefits and efficiency in automation and AI.

Overall, I believe we have covered a lot regarding Perforce Delphix; I have spent ten years working with it and find that it is particularly beneficial for banks and large financial institutions, making it a solid choice for those running agile platforms. I would give Perforce Delphix a rating of eight out of ten.

My main use case for  Perforce  Delphix is masking and virtualization. For masking and virtualization, there is a production database where we used to mask so that the actual values do not come into the non-production database. While extracting, masking, and loading, we use  Azure  Data Factory, and then we use  Perforce  Delphix inside Azure Data Factory . For virtualization, we make a virtual copy of the production SQL database server and SQL Server  database, and then we make the copy from the gold copy. We create the virtualized copy and mask it into the non-prod database.

The best features that Perforce Delphix offers are virtualization and masking as well as algorithms.

The algorithms in Perforce Delphix stand out for me because they are custom-friendly. Every algorithm is unique and allows me to make custom algorithms, not just masking letters but also numbers or any special characters or specific formats such as email. It allows me to meet all kinds of requirements, matching all kinds of business needs.

Perforce Delphix has positively impacted my organization because we no longer have to rely on new masking software. Perforce Delphix itself has helped us enable data masking in a very seamless and efficient manner. It is unimaginable to make a virtual copy and then mask it and load it into the lower environment without Perforce Delphix. Prior to Perforce Delphix, it was taking a backup, then virtualizing it, then masking it on the go, and then loading it into the lower environment, which is a very tedious task.

Perforce Delphix has been of great use when it comes to SQL Server , but it should improve mainly when it comes to SAP HANA  and Salesforce  as I have not seen Perforce Delphix progress much in those areas.

Perforce Delphix needs improvements involving the level of integration it has with Oracle and SQL Server being much higher compared to SAP HANA  and Salesforce . The total level of integration for virtualizing, masking, and loading in a seamless fashion is not available in SAP HANA for Perforce Delphix.

I have been using Perforce Delphix for more than five years.

Perforce Delphix is stable.

I have seen that Perforce Delphix's scalability works well on a much lower scale, where we have small and medium-sized databases, more than 100 to 150. We have not actually checked it on over four terabytes based databases, so we cannot talk about scalability, but it does scale for more than 150 applications.

The customer support from Perforce Delphix is great. It has been consistent, and whenever we raise a ticket, we get prompt answers.

I cannot share specific metrics regarding the return on investment as it is confidential, but we have saved a lot of money and time, which has allowed us to do a lot of work with fewer employees.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that we had to talk with the team, and then they would give us a license code. After that, we would take the Azure  version, get a VM, and activate it. It was seamless, easy, and flexible.

My advice for others looking into using Perforce Delphix is to come with an open mind. Every tool will have its own highs and lows. You just need to know its strengths and weaknesses and adjust your strategy based on your environment. You should know prior to implementation whether Perforce Delphix looks good for your needs or not. I would rate Perforce Delphix an eight on a scale of one to ten.