"I found something interesting these days when experts are talking about data security, this topic is hot now and in fact hottest. There are some sort of chaos going around in the organisations due to insider threat, hackers, cyber attack etc. There are hail lot of incidents happenings every day around the world, Organizations are loosing their stocks, many have been fined an enormous amount as they could not comply to the governments standards for data protection even many have failed to sustain their business due to frequent hacking and not able to protect their business sensitive information."
Technologies are evolving time to time to prevent hackers or from cyber attack etc. which is similar to fencing around a house to protect against intruders. Still there is a large surface of vulnerability left inside the organisation which is called insider theft. It is really difficult to enforce processes and policies to restrict insider theft. So organizations needs some way to avoid such inadvertent situations.
Non-Prod environments are most vulnerable for such attacks, Below figure can demonstrate how proliferation of sensitive data increases security risks.
when you are using ERPs which holds business sensitive information it is really important to de-identify these sensitive information before taking it to any non-prod environment. But it is extremely difficult to de-identify the whole database sensitive information as application data model contains thousands of sensitive columns of different formats.
Oracle ERP is one of the complex application system, to such goal Oracle has introduced Data masking template for EBusiness Suite 12.2 which works perfect with em13c.
I have done a PoC to check how it works. I prepared an EBS environment R12.2 with database 12.1.0.2 and Enterprise Manager cloud control 13.1.
Followed Oracle support document
Using Oracle E-Business Suite Data Masking Pack Release 12.2 with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c (Doc ID 2076834.1)
This works perfectly fine for me. After a completing masking process I was able to start all application services and could see the data were scrambled. It was not at all possible to identify the original form or to reference them.
I would urge EBS dbas to test this out and suggest respective organisation to use this.
Technologies are evolving time to time to prevent hackers or from cyber attack etc. which is similar to fencing around a house to protect against intruders. Still there is a large surface of vulnerability left inside the organisation which is called insider theft. It is really difficult to enforce processes and policies to restrict insider theft. So organizations needs some way to avoid such inadvertent situations.
Non-Prod environments are most vulnerable for such attacks, Below figure can demonstrate how proliferation of sensitive data increases security risks.
when you are using ERPs which holds business sensitive information it is really important to de-identify these sensitive information before taking it to any non-prod environment. But it is extremely difficult to de-identify the whole database sensitive information as application data model contains thousands of sensitive columns of different formats.
Oracle ERP is one of the complex application system, to such goal Oracle has introduced Data masking template for EBusiness Suite 12.2 which works perfect with em13c.
I have done a PoC to check how it works. I prepared an EBS environment R12.2 with database 12.1.0.2 and Enterprise Manager cloud control 13.1.
Followed Oracle support document
Using Oracle E-Business Suite Data Masking Pack Release 12.2 with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c (Doc ID 2076834.1)
This works perfectly fine for me. After a completing masking process I was able to start all application services and could see the data were scrambled. It was not at all possible to identify the original form or to reference them.
I would urge EBS dbas to test this out and suggest respective organisation to use this.
