DETROIT -- Compuware Corp, (Nasdaq:CPWR) Wednesday announced an upgrade to its test data management system.

Compuware said version 3.1 of Test Data Privacy simplifies the creation and disguising of test data in non-production environments, significantly lowering the total cost of an enterprise-wide data privacy implementation.

Businesses have access to very sensitive, personally identifiable information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers and birth dates. This sensitive information can be exposed to internal and outsourced development and QA teams responsible for testing an application's logic and performance.

Any accidental or malicious misuse of this sensitive information can degrade a business' reputation and customer relationships, while violating corporate policies and presenting significant legal risks of non-compliance. With Test Data Privacy 3.1, businesses can securely and cost-effectively test applications using production scenarios and neutralize the risk of a data breach.

"Gartner is increasingly seeing data masking procedures implemented in response to recommendations or requirements by regulatory entities," said Joseph Feiman, a research fellow at Gartner Inc. "It's important for the enterprise to involve business and compliance experts and application owners in the masking process, because they are the best-qualified to determine what data is and is not sensitive. It's also important that they can define and discover sensitive data enterprise wide."

The 3.1 release streamlines the creation and maintenance of disguise rules, while providing increased transparency for compliance-level personnel. An organization's compliance-level personnel now have a convenient tool to directly define the rules for disguising data (e.g., substituting data with random characters, or altering all numbers by a certain percentage).

In addition, comprehensive coverage reports assist by giving visibility to the expected results that are then confirmed with the final audit reports These activities are completed in the powerful new Compuware Workbench, a modernized interactive developer environment for all data types across the enterprise. The custom disguise rules are stored in a central repository and are dynamically applied when test data is extracted from production. This establishes a beneficial collaboration between compliance and IT.

New features in Compuware Test Data Privacy 3.1 include:
* A central rules repository to manage all rules: Shared rules are created using the Compuware Workbench and stored in a central repository, which is then accessed when extracting sets of test data.
* Rules apply to all supported platforms: Rules defined in the repository will produce consistent data disguise results when applied to fields of different data types and lengths.
* Eclipse-based user interface: The Compuware Workbench provides users with an industry-standard interface from which to mask data across the enterprise.
* Simplified disguise techniques: Supported masking techniques include encryption, translation, user-defined functions and functions to allow date aging.
* Role-based authorization:Provides the ability to customize permission levels for the data disguise functions, such as administration, disguise or monitoring, based on the role of the user.

More at www.compuware.com.