OEM Enterprise Manager Security
Management
By Porus Homi Havewala
Security teams often voice their concerns when
they are informed about a central management site being setup in
their company. They
fear that database administrators will be able to access any
databases which are not in their domain. However, this fear is
unfounded – just the fact that Grid Control is a central site
doesn’t mean everything is accessible to everyone.
Grid control imposes full security via the
creation of Target Groups whose rights can be assigned to
different Grid Control administrators. So, when disparate
database teams login to the Grid Control Console, they have
access only to their own Target Groups in which the databases,
listeners, hosts and application servers managed by that
particular team have been placed. The access to the targets can
also be controlled – full management rights or only view access.
If the Accounting department DBA team is
responsible for the production PRD1FIN database and its
listener, they
would be assigned their own Target group and a new Administrator
login to Grid Control.
When any of this team would log on to the
Console, the PRD1FIN database and associated targets would be
available to them, but not any of the targets handled by the
other DBA teams.
Oracle Secure Backup
Note the Oracle Secure Backup section on the
preceding screen shot. Oracle Secure Backup (OSB) is an
integrated secure tape backup management system from
Oracle. It is a welcome alternative to third-party tape backup
solutions that are highly priced and are not tightly integrated
with Oracle.
Oracle Secure Backup protects not just the
Oracle 9i, 10g and 11g databases, but also the entire
environment including heterogeneous application filesystems
(from OSB 10.2 onwards). It is the fastest backup for Oracle
databases, at least 25-40% faster than the competition. The low
cost single component pricing (per Tape drive) ensures it is
attractively priced – there are no licenses payable for any
media servers, backup servers or any database agent licenses.
Most importantly, Oracle Secure Backup is the
only media management software that is fully integrated with
Enterprise Manager, which can now manage tape backup
administrative tasks such as managing volumes (tapes) and tape
devices.
OSB can perform offline backups of 3rd party
databases as part of a file system backup operation.
Or, the 3rd party databases can perform an
online backup using their own backup utilities to disk, and OSB
can backup their backup files.
The other advantage is that OSB encrypts data
before it leaves the database. The database engine
handles the encryption, the data never leaves the database in
unencrypted format. The encryption keys are transparently
managed by the database.
There is also an Express version of OSB
available, and this is bundled with the Oracle Database. OSB
Express is free with the database for protecting one server with
one attached tape drive. There is no encryption possible with
the Express version.
