It may be necessary or prudent to mask certain types of data.

• For regulatory reasons it may be a requirement to mask Personally Identifiable Information such as names and addresses. If your organization is impacted by the GDPR (which applies from May 2018), this will be particularly relevant.
• There have been high profile cases of test data being leaked out of organizations and sold on the dark web.
• Masking email addresses is particularly wise to avoid a testing process inadvertently emailing real users

Your staging or acceptance databases, if restricted to a small set of trusted DBAs, shouldn't be masked. However, environments that will be exposed to developer, testers and other who haven't been given consent to view the data, should ideally be masked, or if masking is not an option, populated with test data.

Redgate offers Data Masker for Oracle to cover such scenarios.

start /wait "" "C:\Program Files\Red Gate\Data Masker for Oracle\DataMasker.exe" "C:\Program Files\Red Gate\Data Masker for Oracle\MaskingSets\HRContacts.MaskSet" -R -X

Sample masking set: HRContacts.MaskSet

Resources

• Data Masker Product Page
• Data Masker documentation
• Command line documentation