Securing Sensitive Data With Tokenization: An Emerging Technology

Tokenization is an emerging technology for protecting sensitive information, based on the well-established technique of substitution. It provides significant advantages compared to traditional encryption and other technologies such as format-preserving encryption. Tokenization can reduce the scope of threats to sensitive information and ease the burden of compliance management. It can be applied across a broad range of industries and applications for protecting credit card number in the retail environment, sensitive medical and personal information of patients in a healthcare environment, and for the transformation of production data into development and test environments.