Gartner defines analytics and business intelligence platforms (ABI) as those that enable organizations to model, analyze and visualize data to support informed decision making and value creation. These platforms facilitate the preparation of data and the creation of interactive dashboards, reports and visualizations to uncover patterns, predict trends and optimize operations. By doing so, they empower users to collaborate and effectively communicate the dimensions and measures that drive their organization. The platforms may also optionally include the ability to create, modify or enrich a semantic model, including business rules. Analytics and business intelligence platforms integrate data from multiple sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, cloud services and external data feeds, to provide a unified view of data, breaking down silos and transforming raw data into meaningful insights. They also allow users to clean, transform and prepare data for analysis, in addition to creating data models that define relationships between different data entities.
Data masking is based on the premise that sensitive data can be transformed into less sensitive but still useful data. This is necessary to satisfy application testing use cases that require representative and coherent data, as well as analytics that involve the use of aggregate data for scoring, model building and statistical reporting. The market for data protection, DM included, continues to evolve with technologies designed to redact, anonymize, pseudonymize, or in some way deidentify data in order to protect it against confidentiality or privacy risk.
To reduce both infrastructure costs and manual workloads in postmodern ERP projects, SAP application leaders and SAP Basis operations leaders should evaluate specialized software tools for automating the regular refresh of their SAP ERP test data. SAP selective test data management tools perform selective copying of SAP test data, but they vary in their approach to data selection, scrambling and performance optimization. There are two user constituencies for these tools: (1) Basis operations teams require repetitive data copy operations that must be as automated as possible (2) SAP application data objects for ad hoc data copying. Some of the tools also enable Basis operations teams to produce a 'shell system,' which is an identical copy of a complete production system, but without the transaction data. This is very useful in many projects for testing purposes.