About Transparent Sensitive Data Protection

Transparent sensitive data protection is a way to find and classify table columns that hold sensitive information.

This feature enables you to quickly find the table columns in a database that hold sensitive data, classify this data, and then create a policy that protects this data as a whole for a given class. Examples of this type of sensitive data are credit card numbers or Social Security numbers.

The TSDP policy then protects the sensitive data in these table columns by using either Oracle Data Redaction or Oracle Virtual Private Database settings. The TSDP policy applies at the column level of the table that you want to protect, targeting a specific column data type, such as all NUMBER data types of columns that contain credit card information. You can create a uniform TSDP policy for all of the data that you classify, and then modify this policy as necessary, as compliance regulations change. Optionally, you can export the TSDP policies for use in other databases.

The benefits of TSDP policies are enormous: You easily can create and apply TSDP policies throughout a large organization with numerous databases. This helps auditors greatly by enabling them to estimate the protection for the data that the TSDP policies target. TSDP is particularly useful for government environments, in which you may have a lot of data with similar security restrictions and you must apply a policy to all of this data consistently. The policy could be to redact it, encrypt it, control access to it, audit access to it, and mask it in the audit trail. Without TSDP, you would have to configure every redaction policy, column-level encryption configuration, and Virtual Private Database policy column by column.