Eric Dalius: Standard Practices & Modern Approaches That Hinder Database Security for Organizations

Database security is one of the top priorities for organizations these days. There are surges if cyber threats with an increase in regulation and also compliance requirements. It is here to stay and also will become more complicated in the near future as well. 

Database hardening is one of the most effective ways via which you can protect your system successfully. It is a robust technique to ensure that the policies you design for safeguarding itself.

However, if organizations are aware of the importance of data security, why is it still an uncommon practice across them today?

What do database management specialists say about this issue?

Specialists in database management believe four reasons contribute to the above factor-

  1. They believe that policies for database security have always historically been incorporated outside the system itself. To most organizations.
  2. The application security is generally incorporated as a role or an account or a privilege model. Here, the agnostic application of the database boosts the use of an application code for security and not using specific security measures for the database platforms.
  3. If you take a look in the past, the requirements for compliance and regulation were less or more precise, even non-existent.
  4. Databases were usually hosted on supported siloed apps or networks that were closed-off. This is not the right approach to be embraced as modern applications and systems. Need to be available and also accessed by users across the globe. The same holds for the trading partners of the company. Both users and partners should be able to access the data online across multiple devices.

Therefore, specialists in database management believe that the above are the critical reasons for gaps between database security policies and their crucial implementation. Moreover, database security policies have evolved, and also it does not always mean network access.

So, what are the barriers to success on database platforms?

Experts from credible and esteemed database management and administration company, RemoteDBA.com state there are several barriers to compound the issue of database security that organizations must heed to. They say multiple operational and technical obstacles to prevent or hinder the efforts of an organization to harden database security. Some of them have been listed below- 

Upgrades to the software

You will find that features relating to database security are continually evolving, and they need upgrades to the database platform so that the latest features can be embraced with success. However, the maintenance of the software and the schedules adopted for the application lifecycle can often hinder the upgrade of the latest releases for the database. However, for some organizations, this might not be achievable. The primary reason being the dependency on technology and business that are located outside of the database platform.

Complexity

Experts in database management caution that database hardening is a complicated affair that needs regular application testing. It requires a lot of security features that should be incorporated into the system, and also they should have extensive features. If these features are not implemented correctly, they can adversely affect the performance of the database, and the organization needs to incur more maintenance and security costs.

Operational and functional changes

Some database security features might need functional and also operational change. This means the organization should invest in continuous testing procedures and also validation. For instance, when the organization is incorporating a virtual private database, its IT team should resort to adequate testing so that the applications continue to perform as expected with the VPD securely intact. The testing that the team performs must ensure that its configuration can prevent any unauthorized access to sensitive data of the organization too.

Organizations can land up with tests that cover not only the operation of the application but also in detecting any malicious activity that can be averted. The costs to validate these data security measures are a continuous one, and it can pile up over time.

Reduction in the portability of the application

There are some certification requirements for an application that can hinder the features of database security. They are generally vendor-specific. For instance, the security features that you will find in Oracle will not be the same as the SQL Server or PostgreSQL. The support and also the certification for these database-specific features might not be feasible for several application vendors.

Start Addressing Database security issues

If you have not defined policy for data security, you should start doing so now. To begin this definition, you need data classes that are specific, protection and also attributes to be recognized and documented. This can imply that the data classes that you specify should be encrypted-

  1. At rest inside the database
  2. At rest inside file systems
  3. Audited finely for data access and
  4. Obfuscated to data applications for specific attributes.

Finally, organizations should consider that every data attribute that needs protection should be able to identify solutions that are available for every data class based on the database platform that has been deployed. You just need to find the right solutions and implement them. There are plenty of service providers who work for this and they can help you out. Make sure that you hire someone who had a good reputation and is reliable.

Once you have defined the above, the next step is to consider the options for deployment within the current architecture of the database platform. You should ensure that you take a meticulous database focused view on data security so that you can re-engineer the needs of the database to meet the security requirements of the organization with success.