Sql compliance

SQL Compliance Manager will monitor, audit and alert on SQL Server user activity and data changes.

• Audit Sensitive Data - see who did what, when, where, and how
• Track and Detect - monitor and alert on suspicious activity
• Satisfy Audits- for PCI, HIPAA, FERPA and SOX requirements
• Generate Reports - 25 built-in reports to validate SQL Server audit trails
• Minimize Overhead - light data collection agent minimizes server impact

Audit sensitive data
Comply with regulatory standards by auditing the most sensitive data contained in your databases, right down to the column level. Determine where sensitive data resides and add this data and columns to the audit wizard.

Stop potential threats
Track access and changes to databases, alert on failed log-ins, and customize alerts to notify of activities that could cause harm to your SQL Server environment.

Pass audits with ease
Templates for PCI, SOX, HIPAA, and FERPA help you meet compliance requirements, A simple wizard helps add these compliance regulations to your audited SQL server objects with preset auditing settings aligned to over 16 regulatory citations.

Generate reports
Choose from over 25 pre-defined compliance reports, developed in partnership with auditing experts, that address security auditing & compliance reporting requirements. The Microsoft Reporting Services reports are available in the Console or can be easily deployed to SQL Reporting Services and customized if needed.

Minimal Overhead
Keeping an eye on SQL Servers shouldn’t bring down your SQL enterprise. Using SQL Compliance Manager maintains a watchful eye on SQL Servers without performance impact implications.

Powerful Auditing

• Customizable Templates - Easily apply the right auditing settings to your servers and databases for Payment Card Industry (PCI), Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Sarbanes Oxkley Act (SOX), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. Extensive research is no longer required as you can simply define the objects and apply the (out-of-the-box) customizable templates.
• Audit & Alert on Sensitive Columns - Audit any combination of columns and track who has issued “SELECT” statements against any table whether they are end-users or privileged users. Additionally, you can be alerted when any combination of columns are accessed.
• Data Auditing - Audit data changes on any table so you can compare before and after data values resulting from inserts, updates and deletions.
• Low-overhead data collection - A lightweight agent captures data from the SQL Server trace stream in real-time. The data collected can be streamed to the repository in real-time or in scheduled batches.

Flexible Alerting

• "Auditors Mode" - Users can be granted auditor privileges only. Users in the auditor role have read-only permission. This supports report and query execution as well as self-audit, integrity reporting, and alerting of changes to SQL compliance manager configuration and data collection parameters.
• Fine-grained filtering - Powerful filtering capabilities enable you to collect only what is important for audit and compliance; reducing data collection, transmission and storage overhead.
• Customized alerting - Provides customized alerting for over 200 specific SQL Server Event types, allowing you to define rules to receive immediate notification when critical SQL server events occur. These events are stored in the audit repository, can be emailed directly to a user and/or written to an event log that feeds an in-house operations monitor system (e.g. SCOM).
• User-defined event auditing - Supports comprehensive auditing of user-defined events. For example, events can be captured for data changes resulting from INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE activity on tables, or additional application context can be included within your audit trail.

Enterprise Management

• Central Management Console - Central console enables rapid configuration and deployment of SQL compliance manager agents as well as real-time monitoring of agent activity and the audit data stream. This makes it easy to manage and track audit activity over a large number of servers.
• Central Data Repository - A central repository houses all audit data. The published, user-friendly repository schema enables easy development of queries and custom reports. In addition, multiple repositories may be used where required for security partitioning purposes.
• DynamicDeployment Technology - Automatically deploys and configures the SQL compliance manager agents, enabling rapid deployment and eliminating the need for time consuming software installs on your SQL servers.
• Efficient data archive - Built-in archiving mechanisms enable archiving to be scheduled on any frequency and archives can easily be restored to the current audit data repository or a separate repository. Additionally, you can easily leverage SQL safe, Idera’s high-performance backup solution, to compress and encrypt audit data archives.

Because many organizations use Microsoft SQL databases to store sensitive data, such as health records or credit card information, securing SQL Server and passing SQL compliance checks there is a top priority. The most common regulatory compliance standards, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS and SOX, require you to provide evidence that appropriate SQL Server security controls are in place. But getting your arms around compliance is far from easy. Is there a way to take this load off your shoulders and more easily ensure that your security controls align with industry standards and best practices?

The challenges of SQL Server HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX compliance

Because Microsoft SQL Server databases contain organizations’ most sensitive data and have to maintain high availability 24/7, they are prime targets for threats both from the inside and outside. Violations such as breaches can result in SQL Server compliance fines. Accordingly, a solid security compliance strategy must go far beyond transparent data encryption — you need efficient auditing and compliance reporting.

But before we jump into how you can streamline SQL Server audit and compliance, let’s take a look at the areas that you need to get covered to secure your SQL Server environment. Following the SQL Server compliance and security best practices below will help you pass HIPAA, PCI and other compliance audits, as well as FERPA, GLBA, etc.

• Encrypt your data as a first step towards protecting it from exfiltration. But don’t mistake encryption for complete data protection.
• Enable risk assessment of your SQL Server ecosystem as part of your ongoing SQL database administration to identify vulnerabilities and security gaps that can be used as an entry point to your sensitive data.
• Keep an eye on users and user groups by streamlining your auditing and compliance reporting processes and implementing reliable account management to prevent privilege escalation and abuse.
• Establish effective authentication control for database logins to choke off unauthorized access events before it’s too late.
• Establish strict data access controls to secure data against unauthorized and unnecessary access.
• Maintain ongoing SQL Server audit logging to track all changes and access events and protect server availability and performance.
• Ensure incident response procedures are up and running to facilitate disaster recovery; it’s wise to assume you will suffer an attack at some point.
• Stay on top of new and unknown database security vulnerabilities by continuously evaluating your security posture.

How to streamline SQL compliance while protecting your critical assets with Netwrix Auditor

Implementing the compliance and SQL Server security best practices listed above is a critical baseline. Next, it’s time to think about how you are going to prove your SQL Server SOX compliance or HIPAA compliance at your next audit check. There are three things that you need to do in order to pass an audit check:

• Prove to a compliance manager that your SQL Server security controls align with compliance requirements by providing insightful reports.
• Quickly answer auditors’ questions.
• Ensure that your SQL Server audit trail is security stored and you can access it at any time.

Netwrix Auditor for SQL Server helps you with all these critical tasks. It delivers detailed reports on SQL Server activity, so you know what’s going on across your SQL Server environment and can ensure there are no blind spots that could threaten the security and result in compliance failures. Netwrix Auditor security intelligence enables you to:

• Slash compliance preparation time by 50% with built-in reports, including ready-to-use compliance reports mapped to the most common regulatory standards, such as CJIS, FERPA, FISMA/NIST, GDPR, GLBA, HIPAA, ISO/IEC 27001, PCI DSS and SOX.
• Identify insider and outsider threats much faster by subscribing yourself and your security officers to the reports that each of you needs most and having them delivered automatically on the schedule you specify.
• Drill down into the audit data in minutes to get to the root cause of abnormal activity with the Google-like Interactive Search.
• Be the first to know about suspicious actions that could jeopardize your SQL Server security with custom alerts on the actions you deem most critical.
• Keep your consolidated SQL Server logs securely for over 10 years in the cost-effective two-tiered storage (SQL database + file-based) and access them any time an auditor knocks at your door.

A SQL compliance manager is a complete auditing solution for SQL servers. The basic objective is to track the changes made to the SQL Server objects and data. The tracking is performed based on a policy-ruled algorithm, where the policy varies for different organizations. It provides a detailed report on different activities performed on the server like user access, user activity, timing and actions performed. It also ensures security compliance for standards like PCI, HIPAA and SOX.

A SQL compliance manager is efficient in providing real-time monitoring and alerts. Its user interface also provides easy reporting features for activity tracking. Therefore, organizations can easily view their compliance and take appropriate actions.

A SQL compliance manager performs the following functions:

• Sensitive data audits – Auditing sensitive data is the most critical job performed by the compliance manager. It ensures compliance based on the regulatory standards.
• Manages potential threats – It continuously tracks access and changes to the database and raises alerts for any inconsistency, so potential risks can be tracked and managed easily.
• Makes auditing simple – It provides a template for PCI, HIPAA, SOX and other standard compliance requirements, which makes applying these standards to SQL Server objects very easy and makes auditing simple.
• Dashboard – This provides a comprehensive dashboard view of the audit results. So, the audit result can easily be accessed by web browsers. All other activities like managing alerts, configuring event filters and checking change logs can also be done from the web-based view.
• Easy reporting – It provides 25 standard built-in reports for generating SQL Server audits. Custom reporting is also possible by exporting the data view from the dashboard.
• Reduced overhead – The data collection process is very lightweight, so the overhead on the server side is minimal.

Compared to other auditing solutions, a SQL compliance manager provides enhanced features to support real-time monitoring and easy auditing. Its web-based user interface, lightweight data collection, predefined templates and real-time monitoring makes it one of the best compliance managers in the database industry.

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This section describes how MySQL relates to the ANSI/ISO SQL standards. MySQL Server has many extensions to the SQL standard, and here you can find out what they are and how to use them. You can also find information about functionality missing from MySQL Server, and how to work around some of the differences.

The SQL standard has been evolving since 1986 and several versions exist. In this manual, “SQL-92” refers to the standard released in 1992. “SQL:1999”, “SQL:2003”, “SQL:2008”, and “SQL:2011” refer to the versions of the standard released in the corresponding years, with the last being the most recent version. We use the phrase “the SQL standard” or “standard SQL” to mean the current version of the SQL Standard at any time.

One of our main goals with the product is to continue to work toward compliance with the SQL standard, but without sacrificing speed or reliability. We are not afraid to add extensions to SQL or support for non-SQL features if this greatly increases the usability of MySQL Server for a large segment of our user base. The interface is an example of this strategy. See Section 13.2.4, “HANDLER Statement”.

We continue to support transactional and nontransactional databases to satisfy both mission-critical 24/7 usage and heavy Web or logging usage.

MySQL Server was originally designed to work with medium-sized databases (10-100 million rows, or about 100MB per table) on small computer systems. Today MySQL Server handles terabyte-sized databases.

We are not targeting real-time support, although MySQL replication capabilities offer significant functionality.

MySQL supports ODBC levels 0 to 3.51.

MySQL supports high-availability database clustering using the storage engine. See Chapter 23, MySQL NDB Cluster 8.0.

We implement XML functionality which supports most of the W3C XPath standard. See Section 12.12, “XML Functions”.

MySQL supports a native JSON data type as defined by RFC 7159, and based on the ECMAScript standard (ECMA-262). See Section 11.5, “The JSON Data Type”. MySQL also implements a subset of the SQL/JSON functions specified by a pre-publication draft of the SQL:2016 standard; see Section 12.18, “JSON Functions”, for more information.

Selecting SQL Modes

The MySQL server can operate in different SQL modes, and can apply these modes differently for different clients, depending on the value of the system variable. DBAs can set the global SQL mode to match site server operating requirements, and each application can set its session SQL mode to its own requirements.

Modes affect the SQL syntax MySQL supports and the data validation checks it performs. This makes it easier to use MySQL in different environments and to use MySQL together with other database servers.

For more information on setting the SQL mode, see Section 5.1.11, “Server SQL Modes”.

Running MySQL in ANSI Mode

To run MySQL Server in ANSI mode, start mysqld with the option. Running the server in ANSI mode is the same as starting it with the following options:

To achieve the same effect at runtime, execute these two statements:

You can see that setting the system variable to enables all SQL mode options that are relevant for ANSI mode as follows:

Running the server in ANSI mode with is not quite the same as setting the SQL mode to because the option also sets the transaction isolation level.

See Section 5.1.7, “Server Command Options”.