Whether you’re running Microsoft’s SQL Server (soon to run on Linux) or the open source MySQL, you need to lockdown your databases to keep your data private and secure. These 11 steps will guide you through some of the basic principles of database security and how to implement them. Combined with a hardened web server configuration, a secure database server will keep an application from becoming an entry point into your network and keep your data from ending up dumped on the internet.

Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database play a critical role in almost every IT environment. That’s why from the beginning, Rubrik has focused on delivering a single platform that converges data protection and data security to ensure you can rapidly and reliably recover when disaster strikes. Our initial release automated the backup of databases with a single SLA policy engine that enabled customers to automatically protect their Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases as they were created.

As Redmond's flagship RDBMS solution, SQL Server provides the underlying data platform for a broad range of Microsoft enterprise solutions— from Sharepoint to BizTalk Server. This, of course, makes bolstering SQL Server security a critical necessity for protecting MS-centric infrastructures against attackers. To this end, the following are 11 ways to harden MS SQL Server 2008 security.

Oracle databases are an integral part of modern technological infrastructure for organizations globally. They underpin high-volume digital business, perform thousands of transactions, and house an organization’s critical and sensitive information. Today’s business requirements and data-driven applications are expanding the definition of “data loss” to include data that is inaccessible to the business for a period to significantly and negatively impact it.

We recently spoke with Amy Berman, Security Strategic Operations Lead at MongoDB about the role of security champions at her organization. For those new to the concept, security champions are developers that have an interest in security and can facilitate collaboration between development and security teams.

It’s well known that we just don’t put services or devices on the edge of the Internet without strong purpose justification. Services, whether maintained by end-users or administrators, have a ton of security challenges. Databases belong to a group that often needs direct access to the Internet - no doubt that security requirements are a priority here.

In today’s world where digital data is increasing exponentially by the day, the administration and querying of that data are also becoming more and more complex. This huge amount of data is stored in the form of collections within a database. However, in order to create, read, update or delete that data, the database administrators needed the ability to query the database.

Customers using Microsoft SQL Server tend to grow horizontally in terms of the number of databases. For recent versions of SQL Server, the max number of databases you can have on a single instance is 32,767 and it is common to see customers push that limit. At Rubrik, we have run into several customers who approach 10,000 databases on a single host. As SQL Server accelerates the push into the enterprise segment, one needs to address the problem of managing and protecting these servers at scale.