Data tokenization usually refers to a process through which cardholder data (usually the Primary Account Number or PAN) is replaced with a substitute cyphertext value known as a token. The token is typically generated via a strong, one-way publicly known mathematical hashing algorithm. It does not require additional obscuring or encryption as the process cannot be reversed to reconstitute the original data (in this case the PAN) short of a brute force dictionary based attack. Cloud providers are a target for attackers since they have petabytes of data.”]
Source: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2985800/doing-tokenization-and-cloud-computing-the-pci-way.html