Database auditing
Why you need it and tools which make it easy
Is your data among the most essential assets of your organization? Then it’s vital to secure your databases to comply with data privacy regulations and prevent financial loss, cyberattacks, and damage to your reputation. One way to do this is by conducting database audits regularly.
Why do you need database audits?
Database auditing involves monitoring your actions to detect, deter, and reduce the overall impact of unauthorized access to your database management system. Regularly auditing your database can bring numerous benefits to your organization. Aside from helping you meet government regulations, database monitoring will allow you to:
- Understand and improve internal business operations
- Detect and analyze breaches in user behavior
- Detect fraud, outsider intrusion, and employee misbehavior
- Respond to violations and vulnerabilities
- Verify partner activities and third-party application behavior
- Comply with various data regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, FISMA, FERPA, PCI
You can further ensure protection by focusing on specific aspects of your databases. For example, honing user access can help you decrease human error while prioritizing data cleanup can keep your system organized and easy to navigate.
Tools to make database audit much easier
The best way to protect your database is to use tools with capabilities that meet your needs. Here are some of the best features to look out for:
Single sign-on integration
SSO integration allows for secure database access without sharing usernames and passwords.
Two-factor authentication, SAML, SSL, and LDAP integration
2FA gives secure access to users without compromising your passwords. This feature supports user accounts with password expiration and time-sensitive access with active and inactive status. With SAML based integration, you can manage all users in your own user management systems and hence you can control access from a single entry. You can provision database access with SAML based access and hence it does not require to share database user password. Also, it does not require to manage individual database users in a database. This free up database administrator tasks not to manage many users in a database.
Database activity monitoring
DAM logs all user activities, giving complete visibility over the user, time, and purpose for which the data was accessed. Tools with database activity monitoring also log information such as IP address, time, database username, wrong login attempts, SQL Queries.
Log and metrics management software integration
Some third-party applications such as Splunk, Datadog may have better capabilities for monitoring data access and anomalies. The best database audit tools can integrate with this software to ensure your total protection.
DBHawk provides database security, zero trust data access control, dynamic data masking, auditing and activity monitoring. DBHawk supports various databases including, Microsoft SQL server database, Oracle, MySQL, Redshift, as well as various cloud databases
Request a demo to see the power of DBHawk – industry’s best cost effective database security tool with a great ROI.
Sources:
https://www.lineup.com/newsroom/industry-analysis/database-audit
https://looker.com/definitions/database-security
https://www.esecurityplanet.com/networks/database-security-best-practices/
https://esj.com/articles/2004/02/18/ten-business-benefits-of-effective-data-auditing.aspx