1. Implement Oracle Data Safe for your on-premises and OCI deployed databases
  2. Implement Oracle Data Safe for your on-premises and OCI deployed databases

Implement Oracle Data Safe for your on-premises and OCI deployed databases

This reference architecture highlights the different ways you can connect target databases to Oracle Data Safe. It also describes the security measurements you need take to provide a safe deployment of a connection to a specific target database.

Oracle Data Safe is a fully-integrated, regional Cloud service focused on data security. It provides a complete and integrated set of features of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for protecting sensitive and regulated data in Oracle databases.

Oracle Data Safe delivers essential security services for Oracle Autonomous Database and databases running in Oracle Cloud. Data Safe also supports on-premises databases, Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, and multicloud deployments. All Oracle Database customers can reduce the risk of a data breach and simplify compliance by using Data Safe to assess configuration and user risk, monitor and audit user activity, and discover, classify, and mask sensitive data.

Compliance laws, such as the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), require companies to safeguard the privacy of their customers. Running a variety of hosted databases in a safe and efficient requires way to manage the security of this data. Oracle Data Safe helps you understand data sensitivity, evaluate risks to data, mask sensitive data, implement and monitor security controls, assess user security, monitor user activity, and address data security compliance requirements.

After adding a database as a target, Data Safe identifies, categorizes, and prioritizes risks, and delivers comprehensive assessment reports on:
  • Security parameters
  • Security controls in use
  • User roles and privileges
Data Safe helps with various compliance requirements such as identifying where sensitive data is located, masking sensitive data for non-production use, securely capturing audit data and so forth.
Audit compliance standards represent a set of audit policies that help to accelerate compliance to regulatory standards. They also help to evaluate whether you are adhering to database compliance requirements. During Activity Auditing, two audit compliance standards policies can be enabled:
  • Center for Internet Security (CIS) Configuration - available for Oracle Database 12.2 and later.
  • Security Technical Implementation Guidelines (STIG) - available for Oracle Database 21c and later.

Architecture

This reference architecture outlines the way Data Safe connects to these databases:
  • Databases deployed on-premises.
  • Databases deployed on OCI Bare metal DB system or Virtual machine DB system.

Note:

This reference architecture only discusses databases with private IP addresses. To configure a database with a public IP address is from a security perspective not advised.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture.

Description of datasafe-db-connecton-arch.png follows
Description of the illustration datasafe-db-connecton-arch.png

datasafe-db-connecton-arch-oracle.zip

The on-premises connector shown in the diagram above can connect to multiple databases. This also applies to the FastConnect or VPN Connect options as this is a network layer connection.

For all the different deployments of Data Safe discussed here, awe recommend that you deploy a landing zone in your tenancy. The following resources provide best practices for security and compliance, landing zone concepts, and how to use terraform scripts to deploy a landing zone on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure :
  • Best practices framework for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
  • Deploy a secure landing zone that meets the CIS Foundations Benchmark for Oracle Cloud
  • OCI CIS Compliant landing zone

Note:

Please refer to the Explore More topic below for access to these resources.

Databases Deployed On-Premises

To connect a target database with a private IP address that resides on-premises choose one of these two options:
  • On-premises connector
  • Private end-point
When using the on-premises connector, no FastConnect or VPN Connect is needed.

When using a private endpoint, you need an existing FastConnect or VPN Connect set up between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and a non-Oracle cloud environment. Then, you need to create a private endpoint in the VCN in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that has access to the database.

The following resources describe this architecture and the setup in the documentation:
  • Connectivity options for target databases
  • Oracle Data Safe private endpoints
  • Oracle Data Safe on-premises connector
  • Create an Oracle Data Safe private endpoint
  • Create an Oracle Data Safe On-premises connector

Note:

Please refer to the Explore More topic below for access to these resources.

Databases Deployed on OCI Bare Metal Database Systems or OCI Virtual Machine Database Systems

To connect a target database with a private IP address that resides on a OCI Bare metal DB system or OCI Virtual machine DB system choose one of these two options:
  • On-premises connector
  • Private end-point

You can use this solution for situations where you need a specific database; for example, a OCI Oracle EBS deployment or a Oracle EBS FORM deployment. You can connect to such a database by using a connector, or a FastConnect or VPN Connect with a private end point.

The following resources describe this architecture and the setup in the documentation:
  • Connectivity options for target databases
  • Oracle Data Safe private endpoints
  • Create an Oracle Data Safe private endpoint
  • The Multicloud Service Model

Note:

Please refer to the Explore More topic below for access to these resources.
This architecture has the following components:
  • Tenancy

    Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing database service that is optimized for transaction processing workloads. You do not need to configure or manage any hardware, or install any software. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure handles creating the database, as well as backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.

  • Region

    An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).

  • Compartment

    Compartments are cross-region logical partitions within an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy. Use compartments to organize your resources in Oracle Cloud, control access to the resources, and set usage quotas. To control access to the resources in a given compartment, you define policies that specify who can access the resources and what actions they can perform..

  • Availability domains

    Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain is unlikely to affect the other availability domains in the region.

  • Fault domains

    A fault domain is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain. Each availability domain has three fault domains with independent power and hardware. When you distribute resources across multiple fault domains, your applications can tolerate physical server failure, system maintenance, and power failures inside a fault domain.

  • Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnets

    A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.

  • Load balancer

    The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing service provides automated traffic distribution from a single entry point to multiple servers in the back end. The load balancer provides access to different applications.

  • Service gateway

    The service gateway provides access from a VCN to other services, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage. The traffic from the VCN to the Oracle service travels over the Oracle network fabric and never traverses the internet.

  • Cloud Guard

    You can use Oracle Cloud Guard to monitor and maintain the security of your resources in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Cloud Guard uses detector recipes that you can define to examine your resources for security weaknesses and to monitor operators and users for risky activities. When any misconfiguration or insecure activity is detected, Cloud Guard recommends corrective actions and assists with taking those actions, based on responder recipes that you can configure.

  • FastConnect

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect provides an easy way to create a dedicated, private connection between your data center and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. FastConnect provides higher-bandwidth options and a more reliable networking experience when compared with internet-based connections.

  • Autonomous database

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure autonomous databases are fully managed, preconfigured database environments that you can use for transaction processing and data warehousing workloads. You do not need to configure or manage any hardware, or install any software. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure handles creating the database, as well as backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.

  • Autonomous Transaction Processing

    Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing database service that is optimized for transaction processing workloads. You do not need to configure or manage any hardware, or install any software. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure handles creating the database, as well as backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.

  • Exadata DB system

    Exadata Cloud Service enables you to leverage the power of Exadata in the cloud. You can provision flexible X8M systems that allow you to add database compute servers and storage servers to your system as your needs grow. X8M systems offer RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) networking for high bandwidth and low latency, persistent memory (PMEM) modules, and intelligent Exadata software. You can provision X8M or X9M systems by using a shape that's equivalent to a quarter-rack X8 system, and then add database and storage servers at any time after provisioning.

Recommendations

Use the following recommendations as a starting point when implementing Oracle Data Safe for your on-premises and OCI deployed databases. Your requirements might differ from the architecture described here.
  • VCN

    When you create a VCN, determine the number of CIDR blocks required and the size of each block based on the number of resources that you plan to attach to subnets in the VCN. Use CIDR blocks that are within the standard private IP address space.

    Select CIDR blocks that don't overlap with any other network (in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, your on-premises data center, or another cloud provider) to which you intend to set up private connections.

    After you create a VCN, you can change, add, and remove its CIDR blocks.

    When you design the subnets, consider your traffic flow and security requirements. Attach all the resources within a specific tier or role to the same subnet, which can serve as a security boundary.

    Use regional subnets.

  • Security

    Use Oracle Cloud Guard to monitor and maintain the security of your resources in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure proactively. Cloud Guard uses detector recipes that you can define to examine your resources for security weaknesses and to monitor operators and users for risky activities. When any misconfiguration or insecure activity is detected, Cloud Guard recommends corrective actions and assists with taking those actions, based on responder recipes that you can define.

    For resources that require maximum security, Oracle recommends that you use security zones. A security zone is a compartment associated with an Oracle-defined recipe of security policies that are based on best practices. For example, the resources in a security zone must not be accessible from the public internet and they must be encrypted using customer-managed keys. When you create and update resources in a security zone, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure validates the operations against the policies in the security-zone recipe, and denies operations that violate any of the policies.

  • Cloud Guard

    Clone and customize the default recipes provided by Oracle to create custom detector and responder recipes. These recipes enable you to specify what type of security violations generate a warning and what actions are allowed to be performed on them. For example, you might want to detect Object Storage buckets that have visibility set to public.

    Apply Cloud Guard at the tenancy level to cover the broadest scope and to reduce the administrative burden of maintaining multiple configurations.

    You can also use the Managed List feature to apply certain configurations to detectors.

  • Network security groups (NSGs)

    You can use NSGs to define a set of ingress and egress rules that apply to specific VNICs. We recommend using NSGs rather than security lists, because NSGs enable you to separate the VCN's subnet architecture from the security requirements of your application.

  • Load balancer bandwidth

    While creating the load balancer, you can either select a predefined shape that provides a fixed bandwidth, or specify a custom (flexible) shape where you set a bandwidth range and let the service scale the bandwidth automatically based on traffic patterns. With either approach, you can change the shape at any time after creating the load balancer.

Explore More

Learn more about implementing Oracle Data Safe for your on-premises and OCI deployed databases.

Review these additional resources:

Acknowledgments

Author: Jacco Steur