In this hyper-connected world, every organization is vulnerable to data breaches and cyber attacks. You never know the points that intruders would use to penetrate your system. If they cannot crack open your firewall, they would take advantage of underlying vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure to infiltrate it. For example, several high-profile breaches involved the use of stolen credentials from unsuspecting employees. It is, therefore, essential for you to identify threats within your organization and to ensure its compliance with the federal regulations like PCI and SOX. The implementation of a Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) system will help you bolster your security and compliance strategy. Here is how:
Advantages of DAM Software
A DAM software is a real-time solution that can continuously monitor the databases and alert the organization on recognizing an unauthorized or suspicious activity, and block it too. It also helps in investigating database activities that are doubtful in nature. Other advantages include:
- DAM software has different deployment architectures to support different environments.
- It uses scalability and modular architecture to upgrade the hardware and add new systems for distribution of workload.
- It uses relational storage to provide various services like data encryption, partitioning, back-up, indexing, normalization, concurrency,
- DAM software is easy to operate because it can behave like the existing applications in your business.
- Deploying DAM software offers enhanced flexibility for SIEM, business analytics, load balancing, storage and redundancy.
- DAM software is cost-effective for organizations.
Issues in Deploying DAM Software
While deploying a DAM software, an organization may face three primary issues:
Problem With the Accuracy of the Collected Data
One of the most common but often overlooked problems of a DAM software relates to network monitoring. This method can be used effectively for collecting SQL activity for non-critical database infrastructures. However, under load, the accuracy and completeness of the method might get affected. So, when it comes to compliance initiatives, this lacuna is addressed by the installation of an agent on the database platform at the time of DAM deployment. This arrangement facilitates effective monitoring all connections and administrative activities.
Problem with the Performance of the DAM System
Performance is another major concern for DAM software because with the increase in the number of policies deployed, the collective computational overhead needed for analyzing the activity also increases. Since every query and transaction is compared against all policies, the performance of a DAM software is affected by both policies and transactions.
Inability of DAM Tools to Gather a Response to SQL Queries
In response to every query, a response is generated. But sometimes, only a code indicating success or failure of the query is returned in place of a valid response. The failure of a query means that it is not executed and the database remains unchanged. This missed query can escape the audit trail. So it is important to combine a network agent with the audit trail.
How to Avoid DAM Software Issues
The following steps can be taken to avoid DAM software deployment issues and their impact on the security of an organization:
- Behavioral profiles tend to accumulate with an increase in the activities. You can avoid the resulting complexities by keeping behavioral profiles at the minimum.
- Find out whether the analysis of the policies is done at the time of collecting the records or during their storage. If you find that you have to incur an additional cost for the time gap between storing and re-querying the collected data, the DAM product might not be a great choice for your business.
Review and optimize the policies so that the easiest and the fastest segment of the comparison is done first.
Audit tools only help to find out the data that has been altered. But database activity monitoring software helps bolster security by helping your administrators find out who views data and how data is viewed across multiple platforms. However, it is essential to employ DAM software correctly so that it functions without any glitch. We have just told you how to do that.
