Which of the following is the BEST approach for an organization in a heavily regulated industry to comprehensively test application functionality?

Using production data in a non-production environment risks exposing sensitive information outside of tightly controlled production systems, which is a major compliance violation in regulated industries.

While masked data is good, anonymized data specifically ensures that individual identities cannot be re-identified, which is often a stronger and more compliant requirement for testing in heavily regulated industries than generic masking.

Using test data in a production environment introduces non-production data into a live system and could disrupt operations or compromise data integrity, which is highly inappropriate.

Using anonymized data in a non-production environment provides realistic datasets for comprehensive application testing while ensuring individual identities cannot be re-identified, thus complying with strict regulatory requirements for data protection.