Delphix Dynamic Data Platform

Short Summary

Delphix is a privately held software company founded in 2008 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, offering the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform to reduce “data friction” in enterprises undergoing rapid digital transformation. While cloud, mobile/IoT, and DevOps have increased agility, they have also multiplied the volume, distribution, and complexity of enterprise data, which is typically scattered across structured and unstructured silos on disparate platforms. As silos grow and migrate to cloud environments, administrators lose direct control while remaining responsible for availability, integrity, confidentiality, and compliance. Regulations such as GDPR amplify the financial and operational risk of personal-data breaches, intensifying demand for faster, smoother, and more secure data exchange across analytics, development/testing, cloud migration, and other functions.

The platform combines data virtualization and data masking in a software-based DataOps approach. Instead of slow, manual extract-transform-load workflows that involve multiple teams and tools, Delphix keeps original data in place while provisioning virtual copies that behave like local, potentially writable database instances. A Delphix virtual appliance captures an initial non-disruptive snapshot of registered sources, then takes incremental snapshots and records changes to reconstruct data at any point in time. Using compression, filtering, caching, block-level deduplication, and synchronization, it provisions many virtual copies efficiently, with storage needs potentially as low as one-quarter of the original size and extensive sharing of data blocks across copies.

Delphix supports numerous databases (including Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and others), enterprise applications (SAP, Oracle EBS), and flat files. Masking and reversible tokenization are integrated to automatically discover and obfuscate sensitive data, supporting GDPR pseudonymization needs. Strengths include broad platform support, self-service “data pods” with embedded governance controls, and hybrid deployment on VMware, AWS, and Azure. Challenges include limited data protection beyond masking (no encryption) and relatively limited monitoring and analytics.

Interesting Facts

• Delphix is a privately held software development company headquartered in Redwood City, California.
• Delphix was founded in 2008.
• Delphix serves over 300 global enterprise customers.
• Customers include 30% of the Fortune 100 companies.
• The Delphix Dynamic Data Platform combines data virtualization and data masking.
• The platform takes an initial full snapshot of registered sources and then periodically takes incremental snapshots while recording changes.
• Virtual copies can be started, stopped, and rewound like independent database instances.
• Delphix supports Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2, Sybase ASE, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SAP, and Oracle EBS.
• Delphix acquired Axis Technology Software in 2015 to add data masking technology.
• The platform is available for deployment on VMware and via preconfigured images on AWS and Azure.

Notable Quotes

• “Cloud computing has freed them from expenses and administration efforts of running their own IT infrastructures.”
• “Unfortunately, as opposed to computing resources, data is much more difficult to maintain and even more difficult to safeguard.”
• “The number and size of these silos continues to grow exponentially.”
• “The notion of DataOps as a methodology for lean and agile data analytics first appeared just a few years ago.”
• “Delphix’s answer to all these challenges is the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform.”
• “Data virtualization is surprisingly simple.”
• “The original data remains in place, but the platform provides a virtual copy that appears and behaves like a local database instance.”
• “One only need to enable a masking policy with a few clicks, and the platform takes care of the rest.”
• “These data pods incorporate not just the copies of data itself, but the corresponding security policies, governance attributes and management controls.”
• “In such a case, a virtual copy can be used to reconstruct the source data at any point in time and used to recover the production environment much quicker than a traditional backup solution.”