“Keys to the Kingdom” or the “Heart of the Application” are some popular names given to the database that stores and process the entire information of a firm like products details, sales data, customer list and other confidential information. Any infiltration into your database can cost you great financial as well as professional loss.
With growing incidences of data theft resulting in the loss of thousand of dollar every year it becomes all the more important to find out ways and means to secure our databases from any information leaks or from hackers attack. So here are top 5 ways to secure your database:
Good Coding Practices by Developers
Better development strategy should be adopted by the developers while creating applications. The application should interact with views which can be made possible by using predefined queries that will minimize the interaction with the underlying tables thereby adding to the database security. Also the entire SQL code should be stored in the server that can be called by the application using stored procedures. This centralized repository makes it easy to update or implement any security changes. Another good coding practice that can be adopted by the users is not to use any SQL query directly in the application code. These SQL queries can be used by hackers to gain access into their database.
Excellent Access Control Management
Developers should not be given administrators permission to create and modify system users and alter their permissions. Also minimum access control rights should be given to the users which are sufficient for them to complete their work. Apply private, protected and public controls as and where they are needed.
Monitoring
Make use of automated monitoring tools to track any suspicious database transactions. As in organizations like banks millions of transactions go on every day an automated tool is your best bet to secure your database. The monitoring tool will filter out spam queries and will also ensure maximum uptime for database and also analyze the trends.
Vulnerability Assessment & Data Masking
This involves segregation of data based on the significance and nature of information and coming up with a data security plan that can help them in information risk management. Also smart database users can easily hide all the sensitive information by data masking. This involves covering the actual values with false but extremely realistic values that will help the application to work correctly without ever exposing the real data to hackers
Encryption and Auditing
Encrypting the information both while transferring the data to and from the database and also while storage adds a lot to database security. Generally all financial organizations make use of 128 bit SSL encryption while data transfer and 256 bit AES technique during data storage for protecting information. Also a unique encryption key is generated for each user which can only be accessed by a particular individual. Also carry out periodic database audits to keep a track of any information leak.
These are few steps which improve the database security and provide efficient database management
