What is Test Data Management?

I am looking to build and develop an efficient process around Test Data Management at my current company. Test Data Management is finding ways to manage, enhance and edit test data to ensure maximum test coverage and efficient testing. Test Data Management replaces the laborious and error prone methods of manual test data creation with efficient tools and practices which remove inefficiencies in the development lifecycle. Since a critical aspect of testing is test data management, it is important to come up with a solution that will help minimize the impact that test data will have on the overall process. A few key aspects of test data management is cost and compliance. It is important to reduce costs and risks. It is possible to shorten the testing cycle by working with smaller subsets of data. It also eliminates the possibility of having to investigate issues as a result of bad data. Poor data can also cause testing to be ineffective and allow errors to get into production. It also helps with the compliance aspect because you can mask certain fields in order to eliminate the risk of data getting into the wrong hands. As systems get more complex and the data is shared across systems, the end to end testing phase becomes even more critical and it is important that data be properly synced across applications. Without a solid test data management strategy, testing will have issues because of a lack of a test data management strategy.