Database pro-active security audits

Database security and audits are one of the most important compliance components that need to be set up properly and quickly so that your organization does not miss out on business opportunities requiring the storage of user data. With the new regulations like GDPR, PCI, SOC kicking in, data protection rules will need to be integrated into the application, product, or service from the initial phase so that a team is well versed at every level and defaults to code that protects the data. Scalability Engineers will cover key areas for the successful implementation of security and audit policies.

Our experts can thoroughly review the current security and audit policies. We can leverage best-in-class security for your database environment and also sure that there are no unauthorized access.

Even authorization can be reviewed to ensure people are authorized precisely for what their role requires, nothing more. Along with security, we also help you build a system where every access or modification is monitored and logged. After the review, we share those with you and help you increase the security and audit cover.

Once all security and auditing are in place, we can help answer questions like :

• ➤ Who accessed the server, and at what time?
• ➤ Do people have more rights on the server than needed for their job?
• ➤ Do we have the best data and database encryption in place?
• ➤ If we are putting any data or backup on the cloud, are we following the best security guidelines?
• ➤ Who accessed or changed the user data, old content prior to the change?

Your ability to answer such questions can make or break a compliance audit. Sometimes it may be necessary to review certain audit data in greater detail.

Database Security Auditing is typically used to-

• ➤ Enable future accountability for current actions taken in a particular schema, table,
     or row, or affecting specific content.
• ➤ Deter users (or others) from inappropriate actions based on that accountability.
• ➤ Investigate suspicious activity-

  for example: if some user is deleting data from tables, then the security administrator might decide to audit all connections to the database and all successful and unsuccessful deletions of rows from all tables in the database.

• ➤ Notify an auditor that an unauthorized user is manipulating or deleting data and that the user
     has more privileges than expected which can lead to reassessing user authorizations.
• ➤ Monitor and gather data about specific database activities-

  for example: The database administrator can gather statistics about which tables are being updated, how many logical I/Os are performed, or how many concurrent users connect at peak times.

• ➤ Detect problems with an authorization or access control implementation-

  for example: You can create audit policies that you expect will never generate an audit record because the data is protected in other ways. However, if these policies do generate audit records, then you will know the other security controls are not properly implemented.

We apply the following techniques for auditing purpose :

• ➤ Manual Auditing : We have a collection of scripts that we run to audit for certain events or activities.
• ➤ SQL Server triggers : Triggers exist for both DML (data) and DDL (schema) operations and because
     they are T-SQL based can be fully customized and integrated into your database directly.
• ➤ SQL Server transaction logs : The transaction log would probably be the first place you would look
     for SQL Server transaction auditing information. By definition, it maintains a history of everything
     executed against SQL Server as every data and schema change is automatically added to the
     online transaction log. Simply gaining access to this information can act as an audition solution
     in and of itself. We have experts who have experience in reading these transaction logs.
• ➤ SQL Server Profiler and SQL Server extended events : Setting up the SQL Server traces and
     extended events are a viable method to audit your databases