Database security is important for protecting the data of your company and its customers, as well as maintaining compliance with laws and regulations. But if you’re relatively new to this field, you may not know where to start.
What are the most important elements of a database security strategy? And how do you make sure you have them all in place?
Hiring a Database Expert
If you want to maximize your database security, it’s ideal to hire a database expert to serve as a consultant or advisor. This expert can help you:
· Bring outside perspective. Sometimes, database security strategies fail simply because the teams managing them have critical blind spots that they aren’t able to recognize. One key advantage of bringing in an outside database expert is that they can check your blind spots and compensate for any biases or limitations in your thinking.
· Analyze your existing efforts. A database management expert can exhaustively document and analyze your existing efforts. They can work to understand your current strategies, pinpoint potential holes and vulnerabilities, and report on what they find.
· Make critical recommendations. As you might expect, a good database security expert will make active recommendations to your organization, outlining the upgrades and changes that need to be made for higher security. If you follow these recommendations to the letter, you should end up in a much better position.
· Assist with implementation. Of course, following recommendations isn’t always easy, which is why most database security experts are willing to assist with implementation as well. From procuring equipment to designing workflows, they can help you with almost anything.
· Test and reevaluate. Also, database experts can help you test and reevaluate your database security systems. Live testing is one of the best ways to determine whether your tactics are effective.
Either way, it’s important to have all the elements of an effective database security strategy in place:
· Physically protect your servers. It’s tempting to neglect the physical security of your servers, especially if you prioritize cybersecurity, but physical security is an important aspect of your database security strategy. If someone can get physical access to your database servers, they can likely seize control of them and cause a lot of damage. Make sure they’re guarded against natural disasters and that you control who has access to them.
· Separate your servers. Database servers and web servers should be kept separate at all times. This is a simple measure that can greatly improve your server security, but it’s something that many organizations neglect.
· Encrypt at rest and in transit. Encryption makes it very difficult for cyber criminals to gain access to information they shouldn’t have. However, to make the most of it, you need to encrypt both at rest and in transit. In other words, your database servers should be encrypted at every stage of the process.
· Use secure authentication standards. Database servers need to authenticate queries and actions in order to facilitate necessary functions, but any flaws in the authentication process can be exploited by nefarious individuals. Accordingly, you should make sure to use secure authentication standards across all your database servers.
· Scout for sensitive data (and protect it). Always be on the lookout for sensitive data and take extra measures to protect it. Your most sensitive information should be practically invulnerable to brute force attacks.
· Split your test and production servers. Just as you separate your database servers and web servers, you should split your test and production servers. It leads to better workflows, but also higher security.
· Manage privileges continuously. Database management requires you to grant privileges to various users so they can harness the power of those servers for their jobs and needs. However, leaving privileges intact unnecessarily can create new vulnerabilities, so it’s important to practice ongoing review. That also means revoking privileges at regular intervals.
· Improve the security of your database accounts. Check individual database accounts to make sure they’re handled securely and responsibly as well.
· Practice ongoing monitoring. If you want to guard against cyberattacks and aberrant conditions that lead to critical vulnerabilities, you need to practice ongoing monitoring. Better yet, set up automatic alerts so you’re notified whenever unusual activity is detected.
· Test your security and keep improving. Finally, make it a point to test your security and keep improving. You’re not going to have a comprehensive database security strategy if it remains stagnant, especially in the face of ever-evolving threats.
Database security isn’t something that happens by magic or by accident. But with the help of an experienced database security expert, and with deliberate and methodical implementation, you can guard against the majority of database-related threats and minimize risk in your organization.
