Securing Enterprise Crown Jewels: How to Protect Data at DB Level

Data breaches once again played a prominent role in this past year’s media coverage. While many organizations make it seem like an unavoidable fact, the reality is that there are a plenty of things that enterprises can do right now to help prevent unauthorized access to their systems and data. In this eWEEK Data Points article, Maria Colgan, Master Product Manager for Oracle Database, shares with readers some best practices on how organizations can better secure their data at the database level. Data Point No. 1: Understand your environment – review your system configuration. Many data breaches occur because of simple misconfiguration errors – database settings that unintentionally elevate the risk of breach by lowering the security posture of the system. These can be as simple as inadequate password policies or as complex as poorly configured network encryption routines. Some database vendors provide tools to assess the security of their databases. For many database platforms, the Center for Internet Security (CIS) publishes benchmark checklists that can be used to assess a systems configuration.