Permanently deleting sensitive data

You can remove sensitive data from the IBM® Engineering Test Management application. Scrub these items to recover from data spills and to remove information that is now confidential but wasn't before, or to delete information that shouldn't be revealed to a wider audience. Information is permanently deleted from the application and cannot be recovered.

Before you begin

  • You must be assigned a Engineering Test Management custom administrative role for the appropriate project area.
  • The custom administrative role must be assigned all permissions
  • Modify the access rights of the project containing the data spill such that only the administrative user has read access to the data.
  • Review the list of Engineering Test Management artifacts that support Permanent Deletion, see Deletion and restoration of test artifacts.
Tip: Make sure you have the relevant information regarding the data spill. For example: date and time when the spill occurred and user information.

Procedure

  1. Go to Construction > Browse <Test Artifact>. Select the artifact type that you want to delete. Select the item that you want to delete and open the row-level action menu, and click Delete <Test Artifact>.
  2. In the Administration menu, go to View Trash.
  3. Select the deleted artifact, open the row-level action menu, and then click Delete Artifact.
    The original artifact is now permanently deleted from the system and there is now an empty artifact in place of it to facilitate link consistency and cleanup.
    • The empty artifact contains the Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) and ID fields from the original artifact both of which were originally system generated.
    • The empty artifact does not contain any user data from the original artifact.
    • The empty artifact is not editable.
    • It does not appear in any searches, views, or feeds.
    • Other artifacts previously linking to the permanently deleted artifact now have a link pointing to the new empty artifact instead.
    • Snapshots and history entries reference the new empty artifact.
  4. After all of the sensitive data have been permanently deleted, remove references to deleted data within the Lucene search index:
  5. If the QM project area is enabled for configurations, remove sensitive data from QM components. See Deleting sensitive data from components in QMfor detailed instructions. If artifacts in the configurations of the component contain sensitive data, consider permanently deleting those artifacts before you scrub the component see step 1.
  6. If you are using IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Engineering Insights, rebuild the index to remove references to deleted data. See Removing sensitive information.
  7. Delete the Jazz Team Server, Quality Management, Change and Configuration Management, Requirements Management, and Administration server logs. See Log file locations.
  8. If you are using the Data Warehouse, delete its repository.
  9. Start the application. See Deploying and starting the server for detailed instructions.
  10. Create the data warehouse repository again. See Setting up the database.
  11. Create the data warehouse tables through the Jazz Team Server setup. See Configuring the server after installation.
  12. If Engineering Test Management is configured to use Link Index Provider (LDX), you must remove the Engineering Test Management data that is stored in LDX to make sure all data is removed. If you are registered with Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE), you must compact the database files and index the deletion. See the detailed procedure Removing sensitive data from LQE and LDX.
  13. Verify that all the sensitive content is not available.

What to do next

Modify the access rights of the project area back to what it was before.