Many enterprises are reluctant to move sensitive data to the cloud — for good reason. Copying tons of data for the sake of development is a huge hassle. It’s also easy to make mistakes: Copy one file to the wrong place, and before you know it 10,000 credit card numbers are turning up in a Pastebin instance.

Delphix, a company that bills itself as a data-as-a-service (DaaS) provider, offers a solution: a software appliance that it claims can take existing data, make shadow copies that can be restored on demand, and mask sensitive information — all in one package.

It’s the latest example of data copy management and data virtualization, which offer new ways to handle data that are optimized for cloud environments. Instead of making full copies of multipetabyte data sets, an IT team can simply virtualize the set, including any changes made to it.

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