Third Bridge, a global investment research firm, faced slow, manual test data provisioning that created bottlenecks in testing workflows and made it difficult for developers to rapidly replicate production scenarios. By integrating Tonic Structural, they automated the provisioning of fresh, de-identified, production-like test data, ensuring lower environments always reflect the latest schema without introducing security risks or requiring drawn-out approval processes. As a result, Third Bridge accelerated testing cycles, improved developer efficiency, and strengthened compliance.
The challenge: slow test data, compliance risks, and development bottlenecks
Third Bridge connects investors and business leaders with critical insights so they can make informed investment decisions. To support its research operations, Third Bridge relies on a custom-built, homegrown CRM system, used extensively across its teams. But their testing workflows for this system were bottlenecked by critical data security concerns.
Their SQL database, tied to their homegrown CRM system, has evolved since the company was founded in 2007, growing in complexity as the company scaled. Because of this, preparing test data was a highly manual and time-consuming process that involved multiple teams, including InfoSec.
Before developers could get the data they needed, they had to submit a request to the DevOps team, which then had to secure approval from InfoSec to validate the need for the data before granting developers access. This process often took up to a week, delaying testing cycles and making it difficult to iterate quickly in development workflows.
Edy Chandra, DevOps Engineer at Third Bridge, explained, “We got feedback from the development team highlighting how significantly this issue was impacting their productivity and their confidence in testing in lower environments when the data they had to work with didn’t reflect the data in production."
As these challenges piled up, frustration grew. Developers struggled to ship new features efficiently, and leadership escalated the issue, recognizing that Third Bridge needed a scalable, automated solution to keep up with their growth, while also strengthening their data security.
Chief Information Security Officer at Third Bridge, Marc Davies, became a project sponsor for the initiative: "It was important for me as the project sponsor to get to a state where our engineers could test their applications in a way that mimicked a live and realistic environment, without exposing the data of our experts or clients.”
What’s more, they knew they wanted a solution that’d been proven on the market. "We recognized from previous attempts that building our own internal data de-identification tool would take a lot of effort and resources. There were a few failed attempts before, so we knew we wanted to buy a solution rather than build it ourselves,” commented Chandra.
The solution: automating test data for speed, security, and scalability with Tonic Structural
Third Bridge evaluated multiple tools but found that Tonic Structural was the only platform able to seamlessly integrate with their database and automate test data provisioning. Competing solutions struggled to handle the complexity of Third Bridge’s evolving schema, often failing to connect or requiring extensive manual configuration.
"With other tools, there were multiple failures when I tried to connect and run them. But with Tonic.ai, it ran successfully,” said Chandra.
Third Bridge was able to eliminate manual test data provisioning entirely. Instead of waiting a full week for approvals, developers now receive fresh, production-like test data on a weekly basis without the previous bottleneck of InfoSec approvals.
"I'm getting fewer requests for live data, and that’s a good thing," stated CISO, Marc Davies. “Engineers now go directly to the DevOps team, and they get the masked data they need from Tonic Structural without the security bottleneck. Because the data is masked, it's no longer a security risk, and the engineers can operate more efficiently. It has certainly enhanced our productivity.”
Tonic Structural not only automated test data refreshes but also made it incredibly easy for Third Bridge’s team to manage test data without needing specialized engineers.
Chandra explained, “Tonic is incredibly intuitive. You don’t need a highly skilled engineer to operate it or apply the generators. It’s self-explanatory.”
With Tonic Structural integrated seamlessly into their CI/CD pipeline, Third Bridge’s lower environments are now steadily hydrated with realistic, de-identified data that matches production, ensuring both compliance and efficiency.
"We’re generating fresh data from production every week. Before, we would only do this a few times a year, when there was a genuine need after going through an approval process. But now there’s no approval process needed because we know the data is effectively masked, and we can safely distribute the data to all lower environments," concluded Chandra.
The results: faster testing, stronger security, and greater efficiency
With Tonic Structural, Third Bridge experienced immediate and measurable improvements in their test data workflows. The team reduced test data provisioning time by 71%, cutting it down from a full week to just two days. Instead of waiting for manual approvals and data extractions, developers now have streamlined access to fresh, de-identified test data without security concerns or delays.
“Before, developers had to submit a request and wait up to a week for test data. Now, they just have it—new masked data is generated automatically every week so we always have close-to-production test data available.”
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One of the most significant changes has been the automation of test data refreshes. Before Tonic Structural, Third Bridge only refreshed their test data 6 or 7 times per year due to the complexity of their manual process. Now, test data is refreshed automatically every single week, ensuring that lower environments always reflect the recent production data.
The impact of these improvements is evident in their faster testing cycles and greater developer productivity. The time and resources saved by automating test data provisioning have freed up the team to focus on delivering new features and making other product improvements. Developers are able to debug and test with confidence, knowing their masked test data is as realistic as production. And leadership has recognized the efficiency gains.
Looking ahead, Third Bridge is excited to explore additional capabilities from Tonic.ai, including Tonic Textual, which provides free-text data de-identification and would enable Third Bridge to securely anonymize research transcripts.
“I'd like to expand the scope and the reach of Tonic.ai at Third Bridge,” shared CISO Marc Davies. “The database that's currently being masked by Tonic is our production database, but we have a number of other datasets throughout the business, some of which aren’t being processed by Tonic at present. There's certainly an opportunity there to grow the use case."
By making Tonic.ai’s solutions a core part of their data de-identification strategy, Third Bridge has laid the foundation for faster, more secure, and more scalable software development, today and in the future.
“If you can keep your data secure and out of the reach of entities that may be interested in leveraging your data for political, reputational, or financial gain, that can only be a positive step for any business,” concluded CISO Marc Davies. “De-identifying your data for testing, which Tonic allows us to do, certainly helps us maintain a good security posture and meet our governance risk and compliance obligations.”
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