The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, and Synadia announced that the NATS project will continue to thrive in the cloud native open source ecosystem of the CNCF with Synadia’s continued support and involvement.
With data breaches consistently being in the news over the last several years, it is no wonder why data privacy has become such a hot topic and why the European Union (EU) has put in place General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which will become enforceable on May 25, 2018, which is less than a month away!
GDPR applies to any company that collects or processes the personal data of EU data subjects, which could be EU residents or visitors. It regulates how to protect an individual's Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which includes all data that could potentially be used to identify an individual such as their name or e-mail address. And the fines for non-compliance are severe up to 20 million euros or 4% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher.
While authorities will be reliant on customers reporting non-compliance and there will be a bigger focus on more serious violations, it is important to identify areas of risk and to take appropriate action. GDPR stresses that software which handles PII follow principles of data protection by design and by default. An appropriated technical and organizational measure to achieve this is with "pseudonymization."
Pseudonymisation is an overarching term for obfuscation approaches like data masking which intends to secure confidential information that directly or indirectly reveal an individual’s identity.
Data masking is the ability to replace or obfuscate sensitive data with a non-sensitive equivalent. So, for example, rather than using credentials that reflect an individual’s name such as "nturner" using something like "xyz9876". Now this approach only works if in the same application that data masking can't indirectly reveal an individual's identity by associating with a captured IP address or e-mail.
Only data that is truly anonymous is exempted from data protection but data that has the potential to reveal identifies is classified as pseudonymized which is still considered personal data. GDPR does incentivize the use of leveraging pseudonymization as part of your security posture to satisfy the design of data protection. In the case of a data breach, if the data is unintelligible to any person who is not authorized to access it then certain notification requirements are no longer required. Additionally, data access requests and disclosure requirements are relaxed when pseudonymization is leveraged.
So how does all of this pertain to the use of software in your infrastructure or in the cloud? For applications where PII is not required as part of use of the platform, it is recommended to employ data masking for user credentials associated with access to the software; and in scenarios where email addresses are needed, that group distribution lists or associated masked email addresses are leveraged. This is so that in the event of a data breach, there is no direct PII available in that system and the information would be unintelligible as it would require access to additional systems to correlate back to an individual.
Of course, that is easier said than done, but again considering the severity of non-compliance the associated work of limiting exposure by employing data masking is a small price to pay that will benefit your organization in the long run.
Industry News
RapDev announced the launch of Arlo, an AI Agent for ServiceNow designed to transform how enterprises manage operational workflows, risk, and service delivery.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced that its Quantum Firewall Software R82 — the latest version of Check Point’s core network security software delivering advanced threat prevention and scalable policy management — has received Common Criteria EAL4+ certification, further reinforcing its position as a trusted security foundation for critical infrastructure, government, and defense organizations worldwide.
Postman announced full support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), helping users build better AI Agents, faster.
Opsera announced new Advanced Security Dashboard capabilities available as an extension of Opsera's Unified Insights for GitHub Copilot.
Lineaje launched new capabilities including Lineaje agentic AI-powered self-healing agents that autonomously secure open-source software, source code and containers, Gold Open Source Packages and Gold Open Source Images that enable organizations to source trusted, pre-fixed open-source software, and a software crawling and analysis engine, SCA360, that discovers and contextualizes risks at all software development stages.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) launched its inaugural AI Security Report(link is external) at RSA Conference 2025.
Lenses.io announced the release of Lenses 6.0, enabling organizations to modernize applications and systems with real-time data as AI adoption accelerates.
Sonata Software has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) DevOps Competency status.
vFunction® announced significant platform advancements that reduce complexity across the architectural spectrum and target the growing disconnect between development speed and architectural integrity.
Sonatype® introduced major enhancements to Repository Firewall that expand proactive malware protection across the enterprise — from developer workstations to the network edge.
Aqua Security introduced Secure AI, full lifecycle security from code to cloud to prompt.
Salt Security announced the launch of the Salt Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, giving enterprise teams a novel access point of interaction with their API infrastructure, leveraging natural language and artificial intelligence (AI).
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of in-toto, a software supply chain security framework developed at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
SnapLogic announced the launch of its next-generation API management (APIM) solution, helping organizations accelerate their journey to a composable and agentic enterprise.