Compuware Corporation has released the results of a global CIO survey on attitudes and practices relating to the use of customer data in outsourced mainframe application development and maintenance.

The survey of 520 senior IT professionals, including 98 financial services organisations, reveals the difficult choice many companies are facing between protecting customer data and ensuring the quality of their mainframe applications. If applications are to be tested thoroughly, particularly in the complex world of the mainframe, test data conditions should reflect live data conditions as closely as possible or the application may not perform well in production. However, data protection regulation prevents companies from sharing customer data. This has led many companies to use data-masking instead, whereby sensitive information is blanked out.

Key study highlights study from a financial services perspective include:

· 43 per cent of financial services organisations that share customer data do not understand data protection laws and regulations

· 23 per cent that provide outsourcers with customer data for application maintenance and testing do not mask customer data before providing it to outsourcers, as they fear doing so will impact the quality of their QA processes

· 86 per cent that do not mask customer data before passing it to a third party rely on Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) to protect their customers' data

· 33 per cent of finance companies do not use customer data when testing their mainframe applications

· 90 per cent that mask their customer data before providing it to outsourcers describe the process as being difficult

· 57 per cent that mask customer data believe the security measures they have in place to keep test data secure negatively impacts the quality of testing and QA processes.

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