City of Plano Secures Sensitive Peoplesoft Data with Appsian’s Dynamic Data Masking

Executive Summary

The PeopleSoft team at the Plano City Council (PCC) wanted to prevent unnecessary exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) and financial data within PeopleSoft. They also wanted to restrict access to sensitive data when employees access PeopleSoft from external IP addresses. Using Appsian’s Dynamic Data Masking, the agency was able to achieve the desired results.

Challenges

Existing data masking capabilities in PeopleSoft offered limited control over which fields can be masked, meaning the City could only mask a predefined set of fields using static policies for enforcement. As a result, sensitive data fields such as social security numbers, bank account information, and more were subjected to duplication and leakage via phishing attacks.

Solution

With Appsian’s Security Platform, the City’s PeopleSoft team extended data masking to all sensitive data fields across their ERP environment and paired it with real-time contextual policies. As a result, the team was able to fully or partially conceal sensitive data based on where access was coming from. Additionally, the team restricted access to PII and sensitive financial data for external IPs.

Results

Appsian’s Dynamic Data Masking allowed fine-grained control over which sensitive data fields the City’s PeopleSoft team could mask for any specified user, in the context of any situation. Further, data masking can occur in real-time without affecting the underlying information. Using a configurable rules engine, Appsian enabled masking policies that adapt to the context of access (user Id, IP device, etc.). Thus, completely restricting access to sensitive data when city employees accessed PeopleSoft outside the secure office network.

“With Appsian data masking in place, we have been able to offer our employees access to their data while protecting their personally identifiable information when accessed from a remote location.”

Rick Figueroa
Application Integrator/Developer III