Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall (AVDF) 20.9 is more than just a dot release. The latest release of AVDF 20.9 is packed with powerful new features that you can use immediately. This blog covers some of my favorites that may soon be your favorites.
New features for AVDF 20.9
- Security assessment: Have you ever wondered if your database configuration is optimized to reduce risk? Are you following security best practices for your databases? AVDF 20.9 introduces centralized database security assessment by integrating the popular Database Security Assessment Tool (DBSAT) for Oracle Databases. The full-featured assessment with compliance mappings and recommendations will help organizations clearly understand their security posture for all their Oracle databases in an easy-to-understand dashboard.
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Figure 1: Security assessment
- Discover sensitive objects and privileged users: There is an old saying that you can’t protect unless you know what to protect and from whom. AVDF 20.9 now helps you discover sensitive data within the database and the privileged users with access to that data. With this information, you can easily create Database Firewall policies using the discovered privileged users and sensitive objects.
- Audit Insights: If you're tasked with monitoring hundreds or even thousands of databases, you might find yourself wanting to prioritize your focus on the most critical areas, such as the top five targets, SQL, and users. Here, AVDF 20.9’s new audit insights save the day. You can now get immediate insight into the top user activities across one or multiple databases. This new feature offers a bird's eye view with summary sections featuring counts and distribution charts and the option to drill down for further analysis with interactive reports.
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- Before and after values reporting for MS SQL Server: Customers have been using the AVDF before and after reports to track and report on changes to data throughout its lifecycle. Until now, this powerful capability was restricted to Oracle Database. With AVDF 20.9, we extended the ability to capture before and after values to Microsoft SQL Server. This new functionality helps organizations improve their compliance reporting and enables them to monitor key data elements throughout the data lifecycle.
- Agentless audit collection: Sometimes you just don’t want to install an agent, or it isn’t practical to do so. AVDF customers can now accelerate the deployment of AVDF with the new agentless audit collection for the Oracle Database. With this feature, you don’t need agent installation or upgrades on target Oracle databases, making deployment quick and effortless. The agentless audit collection service specifically helps small or remote deployments and proof of concepts where time and resources are limited.
- System alerts: AVDF administrators can now get alerts on the status of critical AVDF issues, such as changes to the high availability configuration, problems with storage availability, imminent certificate expiration, and password expiration.
- Out-of-place upgrade: Increase your system availability during updates and upgrades with minimal downtime. Using the new out-of-place upgrade capability, AVDF downtime in an upgrade is typically measured in minutes.
- Data retention: Administrators can streamline data retention with a simplified lifecycle management process and a target-focused view. You can now release, retrieve, and move archive data to a remote location with a single click.
- Upgraded platform: The underlying operating system for the Oracle Audit Vault server and Database Firewall server has been updated to Oracle Linux 8, delivering enhanced security and stability to the embedded platform and expanding the hardware compatibility list.
With the security assessment for enterprises and the discovery of sensitive data and privileged user capabilities, AVDF 20.9 is the most important release yet. It provides a comprehensive solution that covers all aspects of database security and helps organizations stay ahead of the ever-evolving security threat.
Like I said at the start, this update might seem like a dot release, but it’s a huge milestone in AVDF 20’s journey. Don’t miss out on all these important new capabilities. Start planning your upgrade today.
Get started today
Like every release update, AVDF 20.9 includes critical functional and security fixes. We strongly recommend that you apply the AVDF 20.9 release update to enhance the usability, stability, and security of your Oracle AVDF deployment.
We recommend that you apply the latest release update to improve the security, stability, and management of your AVDF deployment.
You can download the updated software from Oracle Support (patch 34987564) or a fresh install software package from the Oracle software delivery cloud.
AVDF is also available on Oracle Cloud as the Oracle Cloud Marketplace image to provision AVDF in just a few minutes.
If you want to try these features, visit the LiveLabs guided workshop.
Nazia Zaidi
Nazia Zaidi is the Sr. Principal Product Manager of Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall (AVDF). Nazia has 18 years of experience in database, database security, and cloud security technologies. Nazia helps Oracle's customers strategize their information/cloud security posture to meet varying business and regulatory requirements. She advises across a broad range of security solutions and markets, including financial institutions, government, defense, technology, telecom, healthcare, and retail.