Security, Checklists, Recommendations - Part 3

Dear Readers,

My name is Franz Devantier, creator of this blog.  I am an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP DBA 11g) Security DBA.  I will be sharing with you the basic duties of an Oracle DBA, and also some of the undocumented, and not so well known tasks. 

Security, Checklists, Recommendations  -  Part 3

Personnel Checklist

Your security processes and provisions will be upheld or bypassed by your staff.  So ultimately your security systems are critically dependent on your staff.  Firstly, how honest and trustworthy are your staff?  Secondly, how aware and alert are they to security issues in the organization.

To ensure that you have honest and trustworthy people on your staff, it comes back to selection.  You need to go back to the interviewing process.  Did the HR or interviewing person properly scrutinize and question the person they were interviewing?  Was the candidate observed for signs of honesty and dishonesty?  Were the references all carefully followed up, with relevant questions to those given as references?  Did you use psychometric tests, to get a better understanding of the people you were hiring?  Either before or after, you would have had to determine if the people have the appropriate technical, or management background for the post they are applying for.

Security depends to a large extent on the individuals, the personnel that work for the enterprise.  Those people who were not suitable should have been eliminated.  Your personnel needs to remain focussed.  If they start to get careless or lazy, or resentful, then your tight security will lesson or disappear altogether.  Your carefully planned security measures can be sabotaged, in order to allow security breaches intentionally or unintentionally to take place.  I have seen many times, that there was a severe security breach, but at that time for various reasons, the security cameras and other security measures were not in operation.  Be aware that the security breach can also come from inside your organization, so the selection of staff must be very carefully done, and part of the security must also be to monitor the staff.

You can’t expect your staff to automatically be equipped to support the security infrastructure of your organization.  You will need to actively train them on the intricacies of your specific setup, and teach them how to optimize the security.  They must know all the procedures that are in place, and what happens after there has been a security breach, and how the responsible parties are brought to accountability.  Regular updates to the staff on the relative success of the security measures, and changes etc will also help.  If the right staff have been chosen, then they will more than likely be prepared to help in a positive way with the maintenance of the physical and other security systems in place.

If you get the personnel part of your organization right, then the complete security landscape should look a whole lot better.

Franz Devantier,

Need a database health check, or a security audit?

devantierf@gmail.com

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