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For the purpose of a private staging server, particularly one used by people who have access to production data anyway, you don't need such "hard" anonymisation
by swombat 16y ago
For the purpose of a private staging server, particularly one used by people who have access to production data anyway, you don't need such "hard" anonymisation.
The main purpose of anonymisation, in this case, is to make sure you don't send testing emails to clients. So actually, the only kind of scrubbing you really need to do is to make sure every email/phone number/twitter handle/outwardly communicating piece of data is replaced by a test email/etc.
The hardcore anonymisation that banks use is only necessary because there is an actual security and reputation risk if the data is leaked by some random developer in India (or some angry developer in London). In the case of swiss banks, they are also legally obliged to scrub that data when using it internally in locations outside of Switzerland.
However, for the purpose of a startup with 1-30 ppl, most of whom have access to production anyway, there is no sense in doing that kind of anonymisation. The only risk you're protecting yourself against is sending hundreds of testing emails to your customers.
- tptacek 16y agoIf your access controls to the staging server are ironclad, you're right. But they stop being ironclad the moment you make allowances to allow the staging server to connect to external API's. Most people who think they have ironclad controls on who can attack the staging server don't.
- patio11 16y agoOr, in a distressingly common failure mode in Japan, when the staging server is initialized by a developer from a SQL dump and the developer does not realize that he has left a copy of if-this-gets-out-oh-god-the-company-is-finished.tar.gz on his hard drive until the day after losing it.
- swombat 16y agoI don't see why access control (i.e. unix/db users) should be any more lax for a staging server than for a production server... After all, it's got your whole application on there. If you're running a rails app, that means it has your whole source code. The solution there is to have robust access control to all of your servers.