Activity Monitoring

Often, companies will have database activity monitoring policies put in place that are set up to watch everything rather than the activities that are most crucial to the organization's success. As a result, company activity monitoring systems are flooded with noise that otherwise drowns out the activities that need to be truly monitored.

To avoid being bombarded with information that may not be pertinent to your organization, here are some tips you can follow to accurately and efficiently monitor company database activities:

Listen to your databases

• Target and focus on aspects that make each database unique to your organization
  • Who is logging in?
  • What processes does your business run on the database(s)?
  • What is the database used for?
  • Peak times and down times for employees accessing the database.
  • When do database backups occur?
  • Find login trends.
• Monitor for security threats and privilege escalation
  • Ensure that security threats are responded to and resolved in a timely manner.
  • Verify that no employees get more privilege than necessary for their role.
• Protect databases through automated software
  • In the case that a person isn't present to immediately respond to a security breach, automated software can alert the right personnel to resolve the situation.
• Respond
  • While protecting databases is often an automatic process, responding requires human involvement.
  • Does your activity monitoring system trigger incident response alerts, forensics or a SOC (security operations center)? Ensure that your systems promptly alert the right folks in the event of a database breach.

Putting it all together

Key takeaways:

• Listen to your databases and understand what role they play in your business.
• Build policies uniquely designed for each database being monitored.
• Monitor databases for privilege escalation, security threats and user abnormalities.
• Have an automated protection system in place when possible.
• Establish a response plan that allows for immediate action.

If you'd like more information about activity monitoring solutions for your business, our team of tech experts can help you understand your options and determine which solutions would be most beneficial for you.