Five Minute Briefing - Oracle
December 19, 2012
Published in conjunction with the Quest Oracle Community (Quest), this bi-weekly publication contains news, market research, and insight for the Oracle ecosystem, as well as Quest news and information. Subscribers also receive Quest ResearchWire, a bi-monthly research report for the Oracle community.
News Flashes
Oracle has merged the core capabilities of the Oracle Audit Vault and Oracle Database Firewall products, creating the new Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall product which expands protection beyond Oracle and third-party databases with support for auditing the operating system, directories and custom sources. "It is really one single, streamlined solution to do both security and compliance for Oracle and non-Oracle databases, and extending beyond databases, to operating systems, file systems, and directories - essentially the structure surrounding your database," notes Vipin Samar, vice president, Database Security, Oracle. "Data governance is increasingly important in many organizations and, as we know from the IOUG survey that we did earlier this year, we have very few organizations that are monitoring sensitive data access," adds Roxana Bradescu, director of product marketing, Data Security, Oracle.
New releases of the Oracle Big Data Appliance and Oracle Big Data Connectors are now available. Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 is an engineered system of hardware and software that has been upgraded to include Intel's new processors and the latest release (4.1) of Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager, as well as the new Oracle Enterprise Manager plug-in for Big Data Appliance.
Oracle has announced the release of Oracle NoSQL Database 2.0, an enterprise-grade, key-value database for real-time big data workloads. The new release adds efficient support for storage and retrieval of large objects such as documents and images, tighter integration with both Oracle Database and Hadoop environments, as well as dynamic elasticity and automatic rebalancing for allocating storage and compute resources in response to changing production data processing requirements.
Think About It
In the never-ending battle for enterprise data security, industry experts say there has been progress on several fronts, but there is still much work that needs to be done. There is an enormous amount of data that tends to leak out of the secure confines of data centers, creating a range of security issues. "There are many copies of data which have less security and scrutiny than production environments," Joseph Santangelo, principal consultant with Axis Technology, tells DBTA. "The increased reliance on outsourcers and internal contractors leave sensitive data within corporate walls open to misuse or mistakes." Or, as another industry expert describes it, the supply chain often proves to be the greatest vulnerability for data security. "A typical organization has a direct relationship with only 10% of the organizations in its supply chain — the other 90% are suppliers to suppliers," Steve Durbin, global vice president of the Information Security Forum, tells DBTA.
Protecting databases using encryption is a basic data security best practice and a regulatory compliance requirement in many industries. Databases represent the hub of an information supply chain. However, only securing the hub by encrypting the database leaves security gaps because sensitive data also exists alongside the database in temporary files, Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) data, debug files, log files, and other secondary sources. According to the "Verizon 2011 Payment Card Industry Compliance Report," unencrypted data that resides outside databases is commonly stolen by hackers because it is easier to access
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