Support for Microsoft SQL Server was added in our Teleport 9 release, along with support for Redis and MariaDB. In this post, we'll specifically be looking at Microsoft SQL Server and will cover how to connect to it remotely using Teleport. Before we get into the steps of accessing SQL Server with Teleport, let's briefly go over a few recommended security postures with SQL Server and how Teleport actually helps to implement them.
According to a recent Gartner study, the fast pace of change across technologies, organizational priorities, business opportunities and risks requires identity and access management architectures to be more flexible. As digital business relies on digital trust, security and identity are — more than ever — an essential foundation of an organization’s business ecosystem.
The Relational Database Service (RDS) service offered by AWS is one of the most popular databases today. A lot of critical, confidential data resides inside of RDS. Hence it becomes imperative to protect this data from various threats and ensure that the data is secure. Our approach to protecting the data inside RDS is based on two aspects: Rubrik already supports a modern approach to safeguarding RDS data from an operational perspective and also maintains a clean, secure copy in a different region.
Redis is an in-memory data store that stores data in key-value pairs. It’s primarily used as a cache for quick data access, as a database, and as a message broker. Redis doesn’t have a default authentication setup in place exposing it to security vulnerabilities, which if exploited could potentially affect the infrastructure of the entire organization. These security vulnerabilities are what make securing your Redis database so important.
In the first part of this blog post, we setup SSL/TLS for a MySQL database, using the built in self-signed certificates. The main problem using out of the box self-signed certificates is that clients can't verify that they're talking to the right database host, and it's not possible to verify the certificate chain. In this post we'll cover upgrading the client connection to VERIFY_IDENTITY and how to use Machine ID to continuously renew certificates.
Many databases were born over 25 years ago, back in the unadulterated times of LAN parties and IRC. SSL was just for banks and sending unencrypted database traffic accounts was just how you did things. When databases use unencrypted connections, it means someone with access to the network could watch all and inspect all database traffic.
Microsoft SQL Server is a popular relational database management system created and maintained by Microsoft. It’s effective in numerous use cases: storage and retrieval of data as part of a DBMS, transaction processing and analytics applications. However, there are some essential measures you must take to protect your database from cybercriminals and security breaches, as the default security settings are relatively insufficient to keep your database safe.
Databases are essential for organisations because they store data critical for the organisation to function. This data can include customer information, financial records, and contact details. Organisations need to access this data quickly and securely to make decisions and run their business. A database can help them do this by providing a centralised location for all their data.
Regulations and frameworks such as PCI-DSS, SOX, NIST SP 800-53, NERC CIP and HIPAA require privileged user activity to be monitored and audited sufficiently for investigation. Privileged user monitoring and auditing for databases are critical as databases often contain the most sensitive information to an organization. Many organizations leverage built-in database auditing capabilities included with their databases to meet these monitoring and auditing requirements.
