With 4.1 million policyholders, De Coöperatie VGZ is one of the largest health insurance companies in the Netherlands. They represent 24% of the market. VGZ thus plays a crucial role in keeping healthcare affordable in the Netherlands. With around 2,000 employees, they generate a turnover of 10.9 billion euros. VGZ is a non-profit healthcare insurer. This means that guaranteeing good, affordable and sensible care is the most important goal.

VGZ had two major challenges. The first was to reduce the rising infrastructure costs of non-production environments and the second was that VGZ wanted to meet the requirements of the Personal Data Protection Act (now replaced by the AVG / GDPR). Working with full production copies ensured a long lead time for restoring and backing up test data. It took VGZ around 8-12 weeks to deliver a test environment. The chosen DATPROF solution must ensure that infrastructure costs are reduced, that lead times are drastically reduced and that data is complied with in accordance with legislation and regulations.

In a selection process solutions from, among others, Grid Tools (nowadays CA), IBM, Oracle and Informatica were compared. The deciding factor for DATPROF was that this was the only solution where chains could be consistently masked and subsetted in a simple manner.

Subsetting and anonymising test data across a chain of applications was a completely new challenge for VGZ. VGZ started with the most complex system since it was here that the most added value was achieved. The subsets and masking rules have become more extensive and complete due to multiple iterations.

They now work with 1 to 3% of production as anonymous test data. The first results were already visible after 2 to 4 weeks. Test Data Management has become a fixed component within VGZ, whereby better test data is continuously being realized.

Soon we were able to make serious savings on infrastructure costs because we reduced from 100% copies to 10% subsets and later even 1-3% subsets. We have been able to reduce the lead time for delivering new environments by 75%. We can now realize the test environments in 2-3 days.

In addition, we have anonymized our entire chain with which we handle customer data safely and carefully and comply with laws and regulations. The indirect consequences of this solution is that we have started testing smarter. We have more knowledge about the test data and as a result we release more quality in a shorter time.