Welcome to our new blog series, The Tradeoff Between Database Security and Database Performance. This series will cover best practices that will help to improve the ability to achieve the apparently conflicting goals of improving both database security and performance.
With the increased use of databases, the need to protect databases effectively to ensure security and regulatory compliance also has increased drastically. Securing databases becomes problematic when not factoring the impact of security into the database design and the allocation of relevant system resources.
In general, the security of databases impacts their performance. That is, when one increases, then the other requires additional cost to prevent a decrease. The reason is that database security needs system resources. Organizations often trade off security compliance to achieve the database performance that is required. It is difficult to eliminate the performance degradation associated with enhancing security. It is usually only possible to minimize the extent of degradation. However, enhanced security can improve database performance in some cases, so do not overlook this beneficial relationship. That is why it is crucial to estimate the impact of security on performance before implementing security methods and also to measure the effect of the implementation.
Security compliance has become not only a vital but also a strategic consideration for any organization. However, often organizations flout the compliance rules and readily trade off security features to meet performance requirements. When a security feature aimed at protecting a database is disabled, the probability that the database is not security compliant anymore increases. That is why it is important to frequently and regularly assess the compliance of databases.
The trade-off presents the need to understand and quantify the impact of security compliance, particularly the security methods on databases and the need to design the database capacity and system resources to deliver the performance quality required by end-users.
How IDERA Can Help:
SQL Compliance Manager is a comprehensive auditing solution that monitors and tracks changes to SQL Server objects and data, and sends alerts on suspicious activity. Get detailed visibility to determine who did what, when, where, and how, whether privileged users or intruders initiated the event. Ensure compliance with requirements for industry regulations and data security. Go beyond traditional auditing approaches by providing real-time monitoring, alerting, and auditing of all data access, selects, updates, schema modifications and permission changes to SQL Server databases.
Read more in the full whitepaper.