Thirty-four approval steps—that’s what one developer had to navigate just to access a single data set through a complex ticketing system.
“It’s like a big black hole. You go in, and who knows when you’ll come out,” says Woody Evans, Vice President, Global Sales Engineering at Perforce Delphix, describing the customer’s experience.
Fast, reliable access to test data is essential for keeping application development teams productive and agentic workflows humming. But many enterprises too often struggle to provision data throughout the software and AI-driven development lifecycle when relying on traditional test data management approaches.
The result? Slower delivery, lower software quality, and greater security and compliance risks.
Why legacy test data management falls short
“Traditional test data management just doesn’t embrace a DevOps view of data. It’s manual, slow and static. It simply can’t support modern CI/CD pipelines, let alone an AIOps pipeline,” says Evans.
Delays accessing data are a familiar pain point for organizations. According to the 2026 Test Data Management Report for AI-Ready Enterprises, 99% of enterprises wait more than one business day for a full production copy of test data, with most waiting multiple days or even weeks.
Those long waits add up, forcing developers to work with stale or incomplete data. It leads to defect leakage and what Evans calls “a huge amount of wait, waste and rework.”
The implications go beyond slower delivery. “Speed isn’t just about time to market,” cautions Evans. “It’s about how fast an organization can respond when something goes wrong. The ability to revoke and fix bad data quickly is critical.”
Cost is another significant concern as data volumes scale. Traditional approaches rely on transferring large data sets across environments and storing full-size copies and backups. As Evans notes, “Traditional test data management inflates costs. But with Delphix, the size to store is 5% and the cost to transfer is also 5%.”
Benefits of an AI-ready test data management platform
Ensuring consistent, high-quality test data to reduce defects is the top priority when considering test data automation, according to the 2026 Test Data Management Report for AI-Ready Enterprises. Without reliable test data, application delivery slows, defects increase, and developers, along with AI agents, spend more time waiting on data.
Automation with the right platform is key to ensuring the delivery of high-quality data. However, despite its importance, only 4% of enterprises have fully automated their test data processes and eliminated manual steps entirely.
By adopting an automated test data management platform, Evans explains that organizations can “get compliance and ephemerality to work together to get fresh, compliant, secure data to the developer that needs it at a moment's notice.”
Modern, AI-powered test data management platforms like Perforce Delphix unite data masking, synthetic data and virtualization to simplify how teams handle, access and version data. For example, generating synthetic datasets that mask sensitive information helps test environments remain compliant and protected from data exposure.
The result is “realistic and consistent data on demand,” says Evans.
“It's not that you can do it once, it's that you can repeat it, augment it and extend it to other applications and systems.”
Before and after: The real-world impact of test data management
Balancing strict regulatory compliance with the need for developer speed is a common challenge, according to Evans. He points to Mizuho Securities, a Perforce Delphix customer, as an example.
As a company providing investment banking and trading services, Mizuho needed to separate its production and development environments in accordance with Japan’s Financial Instruments and Exchange Act.
Before modernizing, developers had to manually mask sensitive data while testing. The separation of production and development environments required the department with authority over production to handle the masking, increasing the load on the database administrators.
To fix the issues, Mizuho began intelligent data automation with the Perforce Delphix DevOps Data Platform. Now, virtual test data that is copied daily or weekly can be used for development immediately after replication. The company also adopted CI/CD practices to automate application testing at scale.
Evans emphasizes that Mizuho’s achievement came from its commitment to end-to-end automation. “Partial automation just moves the bottleneck. It doesn't solve the problem,” he says.
Mizuho achieved a 90% reduction in test data delivery time and reduced labor costs by approximately $700,000, all while lowering its compliance risk. As Evans puts it, the company succeeded because it “treated test data management as core to its mission, not a niche problem.”
An intelligent test data management solution
Perforce Delphix is an intelligent test data management platform that delivers fast, trusted, AI-ready test data. Perforce Delphix earned industry recognition as a Gartner Peer Insights™ Customers' Choice in the 2025 Voice of the Customer for Test Data Management. The distinction reflects its ability to meet or exceed the market average for user interest, adoption and overall experience.
Learn how Delphix’s enterprise test data management solutions help organizations accelerate data provisioning, reduce costs and ensure data security and compliance for the AI-driven development lifecycle.
