White Papers: database

Exadata is Oracle’s fastest growing new product. Much of the growth of Exadata has come at the expense of specialized data warehouse appliance vendors. These vendors have published competitive comparisons to Exadata, claiming: Architecture is what really matters for performance, Purpose-built data warehousing architectures perform best, They see architecture as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. Read on.

The impact on the business from data losses can be deep, and it can be far-ranging in terms of damaged reputation and reduced customer loyalty. In a recent study, more than half of the surveyed large companies have had to terminate employees or contractors for internal security violations. The solution to such challenges, then, is to safeguard data where it lives—in the database. Indeed, database security is rapidly becoming a recognized best practice—but often, companies lag behind in this area. Read on.

While there will continue to be much publicized cases of lost or stolen laptops containing personally identifiable information (PII), attempts to steal large amounts of information through attacks on servers is becoming increasingly common. Securing data on servers requires multiple layers of protection spanning both technical and administrative functions. Without question simple preventive measures such as disabling unused accounts and prohibiting shared administrative accounts go a long way toward raising the security bar. Those solutions, however, do not monitor the SQL sent to the database over the trusted connection path. Read on.

Protecting personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property, financial results, and other sensitive information is a top priority for all organizations. Over the past years, the number of reported data breaches has increased, resulting in damages reaching into the tens of millions of dollars. Oracle Advanced Security provides transparent, standards-based security that protects data through data-at-rest encryption, network encryption, and strong authentication services.

As business operations become more complex, the demand for change in IT increases accordingly, as do the associated risks that must be mitigated. Today’s IT professionals are asked to manage more information and deliver it to their users, with ever-increasing quality of service, in a timely manner. And in today’s economic climate, IT must also reduce budgets and derive greater value out of existing investments. Read on.