Data drives most companies decisions nowadays. Businesses and Executives are making smarter decisions on the direction they should be moving in based on trends and analytics they get from, you guessed it, DATA. But where does this data come from? Well, the majority of it comes from their customers. Their customers' purchases, the information they enter, pretty much every aspect of the interaction they had with any given company is tracked. However, this can be good and bad. With the information they gather, they can now give their customers, users, etc...a more tailored and personalized experience. They can figure what you want, how you want it, and when you want it. This is the good side of it, who doesn't want to be catered to? The other side of that though is these companies are storing your sensitive information that is susceptible to getting into the wrong hands. Your credit card information, social security, name, address, pretty much everything and anything you wouldn't want some random person with malicious intent to have. In the words of the great Ben Parker (Peter Parker's (AKA Spiderman)) beloved uncle, "With great data, comes great responsibility. He may have used different words, but you get the point. Now not to worry, most companies take extra precaution with your data. They invest a lot of money to secure the data they store. There are also many compliances in place for specific industries like HIPAA for Healthcare, PHI, PCI, and more. But what about data in transit? Companies typically replicate their data to some type of data warehouse so they can analyze it much more quickly and efficiently. To give you an example, Company "A" has a MySQL database with huge datasets. They want to continuously move that data to Amazon Redshift (article on moving data to Redshift). They would replicate that data using a service like Integrate.io which facilitates near real-time replication to Amazon Redshift. Now once the data is in Redshift, there are many ways to secure and lock it down so it is protected. But what about during the replication process?

Well, Integrate.io takes security very seriously.

Firstly, we use standard OpenSSL, based on a 2048-bit RSA key using 256-bit AES Encryption.

Secondly, we also offer a feature called Secure Tunnel. Secure Tunnel is an OpenVPN tunnel between our environments and will not require any of your infrastructure to be public. Integrate.io will provide a Cloudformation template that will launch an instance with the configuration options selected during the Cloudformation setup. With this in place, you can keep everything private So rest assured, your data is secure.

But, we do not stop there.

As I mentioned earlier on, customer data like credit card info, social security, and any other sensitive information should be extra secured. For that reason, Integrate.io also provides a Replacement Rule feature. The Replacement Rule feature allows you to replace certain characters during your data transfer. For example, you may have a column that contains data like a credit card number you want to remove or hide before transferring to Amazon Redshift. You can define a replacement rule for that column, and replace all values before loading them into Amazon Redshift. This truly ensures your data is secure, protected, and safe during the replication process. Doesn't that sound awesome? Now you can rest easy knowing all your data is secured in every aspect and you get the benefit of automating your replication process.

To learn more about Integrate.io, you can read more here: https://www.integrate.io/solutions/