It’s all been a bit quiet around here with lots on at work and training for a marathon. One piece of new I’ve not menitoned is that I’m now CISSP certified 👍. I sat the exam in December, but it’s taken a while for the paperwork and accreditation to get sorted and for everything to become official

The main thing I’ve taken away from studying for the certification is that process rules everything. As an in the trenches DBA we’re more worried about the specifics of SQL Server permissions or the Oracle auiting is correct. But why are we doing those things, and are we doing them correctly?

Correctly doesn’t just mean technically correct, we’re almost certainly doing them that way or things will break. What I mean is are we correctly implementing the processes and policies that drive the rest of the business?

For example, everyone loves backups (yeah, I know, this is my favourite thing as well). But how much should you be keeping? Do you really need 3 years of backups? Is that just increasing the amount of data you could loose in a breach? Are the older backups encrypted, and would restoring and encrypting them break the purposes they were kept for?

If you’re never going to use them why are you keeping them? If it’s just for a CYA audit reason, then why not just keep the audit logs? Less chance of leaking PII or Financial data if you’ve just got the bare bones of X did Y on Z.

This alignment with Organisational policy is a core reqiurement for doing SQL Server security correctly. It will allow you to concentrate on exactly what needs to be done and not just running around implementing ad-hoc fixes every time a hole appears.

Expect more posts on this topic over the coming months. And if you want a deep dive into SQL Server Security then I’m presenting a full day workshop at SqlBits 2020 – SQL Server Security from the Groud Up on Wednesday 1st April