By creating a central repository of data from different sources within the company, the process of data warehousing allows companies to make intelligent strategic decisions by analyzing and reporting on combined business data. Although data warehouses provide many convenient benefits, collecting these sensitive data into a system will bring about data warehouse security issues.
If your business uses a data warehouse, you need to consider how to best protect the information inside the system. Any compromise in data warehouse security will allow intruders or cybercriminals to access your company’s sales, marketing, customer details, and more. As shown in the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack, data crime is an important consideration for every modern enterprise.
Perhaps the most commonly used database management system in data warehouses is the open source MySQL database. The following five tips highlight some of the best ways to protect MySQL data warehouses.
One of the most useful ways to protect a MySQL data warehouse is to give users only the access permissions they absolutely need. You can restrict access to information in the data warehouse by implementing role-based control. In this control, the ability to view and/or manipulate database objects (including tables and schemas) is governed by the role defined by the user account in the warehouse database. limit.
MySQL database administrators can enforce strict security measures to restrict individual users' access to the data warehouse, including:
- The number of queries an account can issue per hour.
- The number of updates that an account can publish per hour.
- The number of times an account can connect to the server per hour.
- The number of simultaneous connections to the server by an account.
Since you will use the information contained in the data warehouse to make important business decisions, the permission to view or change MySQL warehouse data should only be granted to key business stakeholders.
Password hackers are one of the main ways for intruders to access any database system. Using MySQL provides you with the option to create your own password expiration policy, and use variables to set the number of days for the user's password to expire.
The problem with password expiration is that you need to find the right balance. There is evidence that users who are asked to change their passwords too frequently may be disappointed by such a policy, leading them to create simpler passwords that are vulnerable to hacker attacks. Choose a reasonable expiration time, such as six months, after which the user needs to create a new password to access the data warehouse.
You can also consider recommending that anyone with access to the data warehouse use a password generator so that they can create a strong password every time.
As with any database system, the importance of backing up the MySQL data warehouse cannot be underestimated. Natural disasters such as floods and fires, system crashes, hardware failures, and human error all pose threats to important business data.
MySQL comes with a series of backup functions that enable you to quickly restore the database in case of security threats. The most important thing for a data warehouse is to create a physical backup, which is the original copy of the directories and files that store the database information. When you need it, you can use the special MySQL function to easily and quickly restore the backed up information.
Remote backup allows your business to choose a secure remote server as the destination for data backup, which is very useful for avoiding problems caused by fires, floods, and hardware failures.
As the current developer of the MySQL system, Oracle regularly releases critical patch updates to solve the security issues of the MySQL data warehouse. It is very important that your company continuously updates these critical patches and installs them as soon as possible after they are released.
Patches exist because developers sometimes find defects in existing software, and they need to fix these errors. You can view all planned and past critical patch updates for MySQL here.
Since the MySQL data warehouse extracts information from multiple data sources in the business, it is very important to use reliable solutions to collect and integrate these data. A good data integration platform should be able to efficiently and securely send data from multiple sources to your MySQL data warehouse, and don't make a fuss.
In addition, when you copy data from MySQL to a data warehouse in the cloud (including redshift and large queries), the security of the data integration platform selected for sqlserver database synchronization is very important. A trusted platform securely sends important data from MySQL to the cloud for large-scale data analysis.
Combining these five tips when managing a MySQL data warehouse, you will ensure that important business data is fully protected.