Efficient test data management is a critical component of modern software development. With the demand for quality applications growing rapidly, managing and provisioning test data has become more challenging.
Recently, I’ve noticed organizations have pockets that perform some test data management practices very well. Whether the CISO has flagged a particular application or a data engineer has taken it upon themselves to pioneer a new approach, you see spurts of strong practices. However, they are frequently on different teams, do not share strategies, and ultimately leave themselves exposed to data leak risk and generate high infrastructure costs. These organizations recognize they would benefit from a centralized test data management strategy, but they aren’t sure where to get started.
In this blog, I’ll explore the essentials of test data management, highlight its importance for DevOps initiatives, and discuss ways to overcome common challenges.
What is Test Data Management?
Test data management is the process for providing controlled data access to modern teams throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).After talking with customers, I’ve noticed this requirement always spans more than one type of data:
- Location: On-premises vs. Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc)
- Type: Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc.
- Purpose: AppDev, Data Analytics, and LLM Training
Rarely does an organization only manage one type of data. However, the limitations of homegrown solutions often pigeonhole capabilities and prevent organizations from taking full advantage of their data. With effective test data management strategies, teams gain access to the permitted data they need on demand.
See my colleague Vikram Kulkarni explain test data management in 5 minutes:
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Common Types of Test Data
There are four common ways to create test data for application development teams and testing teams in the SDLC.
Production Data
Real data from production environments provide the most complete test coverage, but can add friction without modern DevOps test data management tooling because of security controls around sensitive data. On top of that, moving multitudes of data can result in higher costs and slower speeds. Your production data isn’t as useful if it’s delivered two weeks late.
Data Subsets
Test data subsets can improve static test performance while providing some saving on compute, storage, and software licensing costs. However, subsets do not provide sufficient test coverage for application completeness or integration testing needs. Subsets intrinsically omit test cases and contains sensitive values because it's still a direct copy of production values.
Masked Data
Production data obfuscation using masking techniques helps teams leverage existing data in a compliant manner to quickly provision test data that meets regulatory requirements such as PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR.
It’s important that I note the different kinds of data masking — such as dynamic and static data masking. Dynamic masking will simply omit the data, replacing the data values with asterisks or Xs, but it maintains the sensitive behind the scenes. For example, a Social Security Number might appear as XXX-XX-XXXX, which is not useful from a testing perspective and permits reidentification of the data.
Delphix uses static data masking. Static masking takes all the data from production, leverages algorithms to identify sensitive data, applies PII data masking to sensitive fields while keeping only relevant data for testing. This enables test data provisioning of realistic values without introducing unsafe levels of risk. Static data masking is irreversible, ensuring high-quality data privacy and security.
Synthetic Data Generation
Synthetic test data intrinsically contains no personally identifiable or sensitive information. This makes synthetic data creation an appealing choice for initial prototyping of new features or model exploration of test data sets.
Generated synthetic data can use algorithms to ensure that it remains realistic and hasreferential integrity. This synthetic data can supplement masked data, for well-rounded test data management. While it’s not fit for certain use cases like debugging, synthetic data generation is useful for improving end-to-end testing quality.
Combination
Often, companies use all of the above methods. Leveraging a combination of these can help your company effectively meet its test data management needs. Our 2025 State of Data Compliance and Security Report found that 95% of surveyed organizations use static masking, 76% use dynamic, and 63% use synthetic data.
Here are some example scenarios of why your company may need multiple methods:
- Your app teams use a full copy of masked production, but because each member wants their own copy, you need to subset to make the costs work.
- Your app teams are developing a new feature but want to make sure it’s backwards compatible, so they’ll take masked data and synthetically add additional information to it.
- You already have a synthetic dataset, but you only need the first 100 values, not all 500,000.
Why is Test Data Management Important?
Test data management is important because as your various types of test data are curated for different application and team needs, you must have a way to manage it all. Test data management involves the synchronization of multiple data sources from production, versioning copies, sensitive data discovery, masking sensitive data, and multicloud distribution of test data to support agile development and automated testing.
Modern test data management solutions help organizations accelerate application development speed, code quality, data compliance, and sustainability initiatives by providing timely access to fresh relevant data downstream for code development, automated tests, troubleshooting, and validation.
Back to topCommon Test Data Management Challenges
Application development teams need fast, reliable test data but are constrained by the speed, quality, security, and costs of moving data to environments during the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Below are the most common challenges that organizations face when it comes to managing test data.
Handling Sensitive Data
Organizations often struggle to quickly meet compliance and data privacy regulations at test data provisioning, while also reducing data friction for AppDev and software test teams. A test data management tool helps CIOs and CISOs to administer security controls such as data masking, authorization, authentication, fine-grained data access management, and audits logs in downstream environments as part of test data management processes.
Slow, Manual, High-Touch Provisioning
Test environment provisioning is a slow, manual, and high-touch process. Most IT organizations rely on a request-fulfill model, in which developers and testers find their requests queued behind others. Because it takes significant time and effort to create test data, it can take days, or even weeks to provision updated data for an environment.
Often, the time to turn around a new environment is directly correlated to how many people are involved in the process. Enterprises typically have four or more administrators involved in setting up and provisioning data for a non-production environment. Not only does this process place a strain on operations teams, but it also creates time sinks during test cyclesand slows the pace of application delivery.
Lack of High-Fidelity Data
Development teams often lack access to test data that is fit for purpose. For example, depending on the release version being tested, a developer might require a data set as of a specific point in time.
But all too often, they are forced to work with a stale copy of data due to the complexity of refreshing an environment. This can result in lost productivity due to time spent resolving data-related issues and increases the risk of data-related defects escaping into production.
Friction in Release Cycles
For many applications, such as those processing credit card numbers, patient records, or other sensitive information, static data masking is critical to ensuring regulatory compliance and protecting against data breaches.
According to IBM and the Ponemon Institute, the cost of a data breach averages $4.4million. However, masking sensitive data often adds operational overhead. An end-to-end masking process may take an entire week because of complexity for managing referential integrity across multiple tables and databases.
Rising Storage Costs
IT organizations create multiple, redundant copies of test data, resulting in inefficient use of storage. To meet concurrent demands within the confines of storage capacity, operations teams must coordinate test data availability across multiple teams, applications, and release versions. As a result, development teams often contend for limited, shared environments, resulting in the serialization of critical application projects.
Regardless of your challenge, adopting test data management best practices can offer a path forward.
Transform DevOps with Modern Test Data Management
Successful application development requires streamlined test data processes. Learn how DevOps test data management addresses the biggest challenges in modern software development, from eliminating data constraints to improving speed, quality, and compliance. Get your copy of the white paper today.
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Test Data Management Benefits
If you’re looking for increased DevOps efficiency, I recommend an effective test data management strategy. Implementing one will streamline DevOps and help address the aforementioned challenges, as well as give you new benefits. Here are some of the benefits I’veseen at companies with the right test data management strategy:
Accelerated Release Cycles
All too often, development and QA teams experience slow test data provisioning and bottlenecks, as they wait hours, days, or weeks for data and environments to prepare. When virtual test data copies are available in minutes, these teams regain their competitive edge and work more efficiently. With Delphix, I’ve seen companies provision test data 100x faster and accelerate releases by 2x.
See how Dell streamlined their developer experience >>
Improved Application and Software Quality
Teams getting the right data at the right time is a classic shift-left strategy. With data on-demand, they’ll be able to create higher quality applications and software. Otherwise, engineers will use aged test data, inaccurate self-generated data, or worse, no data at all. Effective test data management ensures that data is timely, realistic, and compliant, which helps keep your engineers focused on the task at hand, without context switching. With Delphix, companies can also develop applications 58% more quickly.
Discover how Proximus reduced potential defects >>
Less Cloud Compute and Storage Burden
Test data management helps minimize the amount of data copies used at an organization. According to the 2025 State of Data Compliance and Security Report, 45% of respondents reported that for each dataset they have in production, they have 3–10 copies of that dataset in non-production.
These additional copies can greatly increase storage costs. Delphix enables you to store data with 100x space efficiency and reduce storage footprints by 10x. Data virtualization can also help you decrease storage costs by 80%.
Learn about Delta Dental’s storage savings >>
Automated Compliance
In our 2025 State of Data Compliance and Security Report, all surveyed organizations reported having data in non-production that is subject to privacy regulations, but 61% don’t protect all their sensitive data because they fear it slows down innovation.
Automated compliance will eliminate that concern and minimize data breach risk, as static data masking can be built right into the data provisioning process. A recent IDC study found that Delphix enables you to mask and protect 77.2% more data and data environments* — no extra coding required.
See how Sky Italia simplified GDPR compliance >>
Less Administrative Burden
According to recent research from Perforce Blazemeter, 64% of organizations cite manual work to manage test data as a major challenge. I’ve seen this concern from many customers, and the right test data management solution will address it. For example, Delphix offers self service capabilities, enabling organizations to bookmark, rewind, and re-baseline your database in minutes regardless of the size of the database. No more submitting a ticket and playing the waiting game — you can get what you need when you need it.
Learn how self-service transformed AMN Healthcare’s operations >>
Back to topGet Started with Perforce Delphix for Test Data Management
Perforce Delphix — a Customers’ Choice in the Gartner® Peer Insights™ 2025 Voice of the Customer Report for test data management** — empowers teams to accelerate DevOps. See how you can take advantage of what we have to offer.
“Delphix drastically reduces the time needed to set up test environments with realistic data. This boosts productivity and reduces lead times for deploying changes to production.”
IT User | Hospitality Industry
Take Advantage of Next-Generation Test Data Management
Delphix test data management solutions make it easy for you to deliver realistic, compliant data in minutes, not days. Plus, Delphix recently introduced AI-powered synthetic data generation, giving you the best of both worlds (masking + synthetic).
Further reading >> Why Companies Choose Perforce Delphix for Test Data Management
Ensure Data Privacy & Security
Automate sensitive data discovery and data compliance across your enterprise. Whether you’re data masking for HIPAA or GDPR, Delphix can maintain consistency and protection in all use cases, so you can mitigate risk related to breaches.
Get Cost-Efficient, Cloud-Ready Test Data Delivery Anywhere
Unburden your organization from high cloud compute and storage costs. Delphix offers space-efficient, virtual data copies and ephemeral data environments, to shrink and free up space in your cloud storage. Your teams can use self-service capabilities to get data copies when and where they need them.
Explore how Delphix can help you test faster with greater confidence. Request a no-pressure demo from our product experts today to get started.
Request a Test Data Management Demo
*IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Delphix, by Perforce, The Business Value of Delphix, #US52560824, December 2024
**Gartner, Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Test Data Management, Peer Contributors, August 2025