Data Regulation, Architecture and Technology

Data Regulation

• Data Regulation: what regulations do your organisations near to adhere to, but more broadly, what are those regulations underpinned by in terms of policies and standards in your organisation; and how do they affect the way that you handle data and the way that you would design your IT systems.

Speaking with industry insight, Rich Jordan, Enterprise Solutions Architect from Curiosity Software, considers there’s a need to identify and categorise data in two specific ways: at an IT System level, but also an organisational level, ie, data flows and data models. 

In effect, GDPR regulation needn’t limit your test data capability, and not all live data should be considered as personal identifiable information (PII), sensitive personal information (SPI), or commercially sensitive information. 

If you're actually complementing these regulations by fully understanding how your organisation deals with sensitive data you can deliver a far better and effective test data strategy and accelerate your testing journey.

Architecture and Technology

• Architecture and Technology: organisations will have a spectrum of technologies, both old and new. How do these technologies and the way they integrate create challenges in the way that you test and the way that you get your data into your systems to allow you to test.

Taking the architectural principle of Loose Coupling could this help manage integrated systems, ie, going from Mainframe to SQL, then to NoSQL databases, or be a useful principle for such an event streaming architecture like Kafka or a Microservices architecture? 

Ultimately, do you know what are your organisation’s core technologies which hold data and how they relate to any architectural principles already implemented? 

The benefit of knowing the answer to this question is that you’ll be concentrating test effort and minimising the volume of test Data needed.