SYSTEM AND METHOD OF SORT-ORDER PRESERVING TOKENIZATION

An intercepting proxy server processes traffic between an enterprise user and a cloud application. The intercepting proxy server provides interception of real data elements in communications from the enterprise to the cloud and replacing them with obfuscating tokens. Tokens included in results returned from the cloud, are intercepted by the intercepting proxy server, and replaced with the corresponding real data elements. In order for the sort order of the tokens to correspond to the sort order of the corresponding real data elements, a sort order preserving data compression is performed on parts of the real data elements, and the compressed values concatenated with the obfuscated tokens, thus producing sortable tokens which, even though they are obfuscated, appear in the correct sort order in the cloud application.