Databases Need Least Privilege Too

The most sensitive information assets for any size company larger or small tends to be buried inside a database sitting on a server. It doesn't matter if that server is physical, virtual or cloud based. Some organizations choose to protect the database and some the server. The best solution would be to protect both according to their intrinsically different requirements. We at BeyondTrust have been experts in least privilege, insider threats, privilege identity management and the implications for governance, risk and compliance for over two decades now. We've seen an evolution in how corporations and especially our vast customer base are looking at ways of securing the perimeter within the extended enterprise as cloud and virtual sprawl takes root. One of the most important observations recently involves the nature of database security and the debate of whether to rely exclusively on the security tools provided by the database vendor or leverage 3rd party solutions to extend those tools risk mitigation capabilities. What we are seeing mostly is that 3rd party tools do significantly extend the security, risk mitigation and compliance value to organizations and therefore critical to any database administrator's checklist. In this blog we have talked extensively about the value of session management (read "logging") in concert with policy-based brokering (read "least privilege"). This also extends to the application space, and specifically databases. Watch this blog for lots more on this subject as we think it is getting very hot again.