This practice involves protecting sensitive data and determining how to do so in the right way. Data sensitivity involves the use of cryptography to preserve data confidentiality or integrity and redundancy.

For example, it is a common practice to use nonsense text in the passwords that our application uses to connect to a database, so we make this recommendation accurate by keeping credentials encrypted. Another case might involve working on a banking application and needing to present a credit card number. In this case, we would encrypt the number, and might even mask the number, to make it illegible to humans.