Cloud Security Perspectives and Insights
Oracle Data Safe: Five Ways to Help Protect Your Digital Assets
Data is one of your most valuable assets. If you don’t protect it properly, this same data can become your biggest liability. Just ask any of the companies who have been in the news after they experienced a large breach. They lost not just highly sensitive personal, financial, health and IP data, but it also often impacted their brand and resulted in significant remediation expenses and fines.
With today’s cyber attackers using advanced, automated hacking tools, typical organizations with limited expertise, time, or tools do not stand a chance against this asymmetric warfare. The question for them becomes not if they will be breached, but when.
Without technology and automation, most organizations are sitting ducks. We need to rethink how to defend databases, the repository of most sensitive assets.
What About the Cloud?
As breach awareness has gone up, our customers are increasingly asking about security as they move their databases to the cloud. First and foremost, they are concerned with the security of the underlying OS, VMs, and networking infrastructure. But they are also asking about protection and isolation from the cloud service providers as well.
As customers hear about our cloud security, along with the on-line security patching, strict separation of duties for our administrators, and always-on encryption options for cloud databases, those concerns are alleviated.
As we double-click into their remaining concerns, the following issues bubble up:
- Are my databases configured securely? Are there any gaps?
- Where is my sensitive data? Is it properly secured?
- Who are my risky users? What are they doing? What could they do, given their privileges?
- Can I meet my compliance requirements?
Customers want to protect their systems 24x7x365 because a single hit could lead to a total loss. But protecting is not straight forward without automation and unification.
Enter Data Safe!
In response to customer concerns, we created Oracle Data Safe – a modern, unified, and automated security service – to help defend customers’ databases on Oracle Cloud. Data Safe is designed to detect gaps in their defensive posture, give visibility into security issues with data, users, and applications, and provide recommendations on how to contain security risks.
Five Primary Features of Oracle Data Safe
At a high-level, Data Safe provides:
- Database Security and Compliance Assessment: Data Safe helps ensure your databases are securely configured. It identifies drifts from best practices, offers recommendations for remediation, and helps you comply with regulations such as EU GDPR, DISA STIGs, and CIS Benchmarks. It categorizes and prioritizes these risks so that you can decide which ones to address first.
- User Risk Assessment: Data Safe can create reports on your users, roles, and privileges, highlighting critical users you should closely monitor/control. It can further analyze static and dynamic user profiles highlighting last login times and IP addresses. As hackers typically target users, it is critical to understand the gaps they might exploit.
- User Activity Auditing and Reporting: Data Safe can track database user activity and raise alerts on risky actions, a must-have requirement for many regulations. You can select from default audit policies for regular and privileged users and use one of many out-of-the-box audit reports for various database activities. You can retain the audit data for up to a year for forensics in case something were to go wrong.
- Sensitive Data Discovery: Today most customers do not know what sensitive data they have and where it is located. Data Safe helps you discover the amount and location of 125+ different types of sensitive data across hundreds of columns spanning multiple databases. Customers can also add support for their own custom sensitive types easily. Once you know how much sensitive data you have and where it resides, it is easier to assess the risk and protect that data.
- Data Masking: Data Safe can mask data while maintaining complex data relationships. Data Safe minimizes the amount of personal data and allows internal test, development, and analytics teams to operate with reduced risk in an environment where sensitive data has been removed.
360 Degree Insight
Oracle Data Safe can give you full 360-degree insight into the security of all of your databases, including risks with security configuration, data, users, and open alerts. This unification helps simplify understanding the security posture, and the risk profile of the database.
Oracle Data Safe Console
Data Safe helps businesses gain insight into their data by helping them discover where their sensitive data is, what sensitive categories and types they have, and how much they have.
Identify Sensitive Data with Data Safe
No More Compromises!
We believe that keeping data secure by default is absolutely critical to help protect against the asymmetric cyber warfare. No “ifs, ands, or buts” about it. Organizations should not have to choose between security and performance, or security and complexity, or for that matter, security and expenses.
To this end, we have unified and simplified proven security technologies from our on-premises portfolio, and combined Oracle Data Safe with all Database as a Service offerings in the Oracle Cloud, including the Oracle Autonomous Database.
Data Safe scales from organizations with just one database to enterprises with hundreds. With Data Safe, you neither have to worry about any expensive setup, nor train any specialized resources. It can provide defaults based upon best practices, and allows customization. With Data Safe, there are no compromises!
Helps Keep Your Data Assets Safe and Secure
In today’s world of rapidly evolving threats to the security of your data, Data Safe makes modern, unified, and automated security available to every single database customer on Oracle Cloud.
In the past, you may have been hesitant about moving to the cloud due to security concerns, but security is now the reason to move to the cloud. Learn how Oracle Data Safe can help your organization today. Be sure to tune in next Tuesday for the next blog in our series on Data Safe.
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Amazing stuff, need of the hour fulfilled by Oracle. As we are known for being proactive in security arena. Well explained, thank you Vipin.