Protecting your company’s databases is important for several reasons. First, it prevents sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands. Second, there may be regulatory fines and other forms of legal censure that you’d be exposed to in the event of a data breach or loss. Third, it can affect your organization’s reputation.
Loss of reputation can be especially expensive. It could take your business anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years to recover from the reputational damage that accompanies a data breach. In this context, preventing a data breach is something you’d want to dedicate plenty of time and resources.
Database security is therefore not something you can afford to relegate to the periphery. It’s a continuous effort. You have to be certain that your data is always protected from the evolving threats to it. Here’s a look at the most important aspects of securing your company’s databases:
1. Invest in Security Software
If you are going to successfully secure your database, being deeply aware of each of its elements is essential—who has access, what they have access to and how well the database performs. While you could always utilize the database’s inbuilt security tools, you are likely to have better results if you incorporate third party software such as antivirus, firewalls and mysql monitoring applications.
Database monitoring tools, in particular, have convenient dashboards that make it easy to pick up anomalies, suspicious user behavior or unusual system activity. They also give you greater power over the user access management process so you can better keep tabs on inactive users, users with excessive privileges and new user accounts created without requisite authorization.
2. Classify Data by Sensitivity
Your organization hosts plenty of data but it’s not all of equal importance. For example, a newspaper cutout or a printout of industry regulations are forms of data. However, there’s no benefit to be derived from protecting such easily available public information.
On the other extreme, passwords are perhaps the most sensitive information in your organization and should enjoy the highest level of protection. All other data in your organization will fall somewhere within this spectrum of sensitivity.
Data protection and database security cost money. Classification helps you direct your precious resources to the data that actually needs to be protected.
3. Encrypt Sensitive Data
Usernames and passwords create a barrier between unauthorized persons and the contents of your database. They don’t, however, guarantee that an intruder will not have access to the database files. For instance, if an attacker obtains server administrator credentials, they may be able to circumvent the database’s access management mechanisms and get to the actual files.
This is why it’s important that you have an added layer of protection—in this case, encryption. Encryption ensures that if someone somehow gains access to your database tables, they cannot decipher the data therein. As long as an intruder doesn’t have the decryption keys, any data they do see will be useless.
4. Secure Non-Production Databases
Most organizations will spare no effort in protecting their production databases from security threats. However, they fail to do the same to their test environment databases. This is a serious oversight since most companies simply copy a week or months-old version of their production database onto their test environments.
As a result, a lot of sensitive data such as customer profiles, transaction history and company financials that would otherwise be protected are now exposed in the test environment. An unsecured test environment can, therefore, render useless all efforts at securing the production database.
There are two techniques you could use to protect test databases. The first is to apply the same security controls in test environments that you do in production. The second is to anonymize the data in the test database. That means substituting numbers and words without changing the logical structure of the database and data.
Your database is an attractive target for hackers and identity thieves. Invest in strategies and solutions that give you the control and visibility you need to keep unauthorized persons out.
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