How To Maintain Database Security

Definition: 

Database security is a collection of measures and procedures used to prevent unwanted people from accessing databases, committing data breaches, and other issues related to data security. Some examples of database security measures include authentication, authorization, encryption, auditing, monitoring, and other methods designed to ensure the security, integrity, and accessibility of data stored in a database system. 

The main function of maintaining database security: 

A database system stores various data as valuable resources (e.g., personal information that belong to someone) to be managed as a strategic interest of the company so that the stored data has confidentiality or privacy so that the database system needs to be ensured that it is maintained and confidential. Database security is used to protect the system from intentional or unintentional threats that can harm data in a database system such as theft and fraud on existing data, loss of confidentiality (secrecy) which refers to the need to maintain data confidentiality (critical data), loss of privacy which refers to the need to protect data about individuals, loss of integrity that renders data invalid or corrupt and loss of data availability or data inaccessible. And also, security breaches can affect other parts of the system, which in turn can affect the database. Therefore, I can say that the main function of maintaining database security is to safeguard the data of a database in order to avoid existing threats so as to minimize losses caused by anticipated events in a cost-effective manner without being too restrictive for users. 

The steps that can be taken to maintain database security: 

1. Authorization: Authorization is useful for allowing a subject to legally have access to a system database or system object. Authorization is arguably the mechanism that determines who the user is with whom he claims.
2. Access controls: Access control is based on granting (GRANT) and revoking (REVOKE) access to a database system. Granting access to users to complete their work by not giving full access to a database. However, giving excessive access can cause data compromise so that this can threaten the usability of the database if there is access from outsiders who can change the database structure, data changes, and data is lost.
3. Views: The use of Views is most often used to hide certain data from a database system. With this Views function, we can hide data that is private (sensitive) without the knowledge of the user who sees it from Views.
4. Backup and recovery: A good database security must have a backup and restore of the database system itself to guard against things that may be unavoidable such as natural disasters. A DBMS can make regular copies of the data in the database system for storage and recovery if needed. This is done so that in the event of a system failure that could result in lost data, users, or admins can easily restore lost data.
5. Integrity: Integrity is needed to prevent the data in the database system to remain valid so that the data in the database system does not give wrong or wrong results to the user.
6. Encryption: Data encryption is used to protect sensitive data in a database system. Encrypted data is classified as safe because the data is protected from unknown external threats. However, the drawback is that in accessing the data later, the DBMS needs to crack the encryption code so that the performance strength of the database system can be reduced because encryption usually uses a special algorithm to convert text data into complex ciphertext data.
7. RAID technology (RAID technology): RAID technology is a data storage technology that uses a method of combining several hard disks into a virtual one which is a solution for data capacity that increases over time on a computer system. The use of RAID aims for data security and provides server speed on the database system. RAID has the ability to copy data to several other hard drives which can help in data backup and can regenerate data that has been damaged by several factors.

References: 

• Connolly, T., & Begg, C. (2015). Database Systems: A Practical Approach to Design, Implementation, and Management. 6th edition. Pearson Education. USA. ISBN: 978-1-292-06118-4, Chapter 20