PeopleSoft customers have several Data Masking options:
- App-specific masking,
- Data Privacy Framework,
- Page and Field Configurator,
- Event Mapping, and
- Bolt-on solutions, such as Pathlock's Security Solution for PeopleSoft.
Let's compare the various options.
Event Mapping
Event Mapping is the most flexible option, allowing us to use any masking character, from alpha-numeric to emoji. In fact, you may even combine the space character with custom CSS to leverage any character, including custom Fonts, such as FontAwesome. Relevant PeopleCode functions and methods include:
Field.SetDisplayMask Field.AddFFClass AddStylesheet
Check out this video to learn more about Event Mapping for Data Masking:
Page and Field Configurator
Page and Field Configurator is less flexible but easier to apply than Event Mapping. Page and Field Configurator offers a point-click interface to configure masking against page fields. Masking characters are limited to * and x (although this is configurable through masking profiles).
App-specific masking
The HCM team built its own registry of sensitive fields with a masking utility. You can learn more about this feature in the Quest blog post Maintaining Data Privacy in PeopleSoft HCM. What makes this option compelling is:
- The HCM team wrote all the code. All we have to do is choose our sensitive fields, components, and roles.
- If anything breaks, we file a ticket for the HCM team to fix. This is in contrast to Page and Field Configurator and Event Mapping, which are site-specific isolated customizations and, therefore, the customer's responsibility to fix.
- This solution has broad coverage. If we choose to mask a sensitive field, such as birth date, then all HCM pages and components should mask that field. Event Mapping and Page and Field Configurator, on the other hand, only mask one component. If we used either of those solutions to mask the birth date field, we would need to apply that masking to all components ourselves.
Data Privacy Framework
The Data Privacy Framework allows us to apply masking to query results. This is not mutually exclusive. You may choose to apply the Data Privacy Framework along with any of the other options.
Bolt-on Solutions
My favorite data masking solution is Pathlock's Security Solution for PeopleSoft. Besides the basics of masking, Pathlock's solution also allows us to unmask using a variety of techniques, including:
- Click-to-view (a loggable event) and
- MFA-to-view (also loggable but requiring a second factor to confirm your identity).
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