You can use Dynamic Data Masking to mask or prevent access to sensitive data stored in production and non-production databases. You set up the rules to specify the database requests to intercept and the masking actions to apply. Dynamic Data Masking monitors incoming database requests from the application. Dynamic Data Masking applies the data masking rules to the database request before it sends it to the database. The database processes the modified request as normal and returns masked results to Dynamic Data Masking. Dynamic Data Masking then sends the results to the application.

You can use Dynamic Data Masking to mask data for specific types of database requests or you can restrict access to data from certain groups within an organization. For example, you can create a rule to apply a masking function to credit card numbers when the database request comes from a support team member. When the database sends the data back to the application, the support team member sees the masked numbers instead of the real credit card numbers.