As noted in the Introduction, the exponential growth of business and personal connections over the Internet has put valuable and sensitive data at greater risk than ever before.Figure 1–1 illustrates the complex computing environment that your system security plan must encompass.
Figure 1–1 Scope of System Security Needs
You must protect databases and the servers on which they reside; you must administer and protect the rights of internal database users; and you must
guarantee the confidentiality of e-business customers and their data as they access your database.
The Internet enables businesses to use information more effectively by allowing customers, suppliers, employees, and partners to get access to the business information they need, when they need it. The greatest promise of e-business is more timely information accessible to more people, at reduced cost of information access.
Changed Processes
These benefits are challenged by the security vulnerabilities associated with replacing trusted and accountable human processes with easy access over the
Database Servers
Clients
Application Server Internet
Firewall Firewall
Promises and Problems of the Internet
Internet. "Cutting out the middleman" too often cuts out the information security that the middleman provides. Many brick-and-mortar business processes typically performed by employees, such as typing in an order received by telephone, mail, or fax, are now done directly by outsiders using an Internet connection. While
employees are not invariably reliable, at least they are known, and their access to sensitive data is limited by their job function. Physical and procedural controls can be more readily enforced, and there is disciplinary or legal recourse against employees who pass sensitive information outside the company contrary to policy.
The threat of punishment thus helps prevent unauthorized access.
Higher Volumes
But in the Internet-enabled world, users now include persons outside the traditional corporate boundary, such as prospects, customers, suppliers, partners, and
ex-employees. The potential user community expands from a small group of known, vetted users accessing data on an intranet to thousands of users accessing data over the Internet.
All these users can have direct and immediate online access to business information. Only some of it pertains to each legitimate user; the rest needs protection even during legitimate access. And all of it needs protection from illegitimate access.
More Valuable Data
In addition, the data available for access has changed. Online data has grown more diverse, more timely, more integrated, and more valuable. It is more tempting than ever before. The reasons arise from the efficiencies offered by Internet-enabled business practices. A great variety of costs can be reduced or eliminated while reaching ever more prospects and serving ever more customers. Inventories can be reduced by streamlined operations that give suppliers direct access to consolidated order information and allow just-in-time purchasing. Online competitive bidding can help companies pay lower costs and offer consumers lower prices. Costly errors and delays from manual data handling can be reduced or eliminated by enabling other businesses and consumers to submit and receive business information directly through the Internet.
These Internet processes can often replace even electronic data interchange
mechanisms, which are typically proprietary and difficult to integrate with multiple
Promises and Problems of the Internet
integration of formerly physically separate and incompatible databases and applications — often called silos or islands of information — enables faster and better use of sales, manufacturing, distribution, and financial information.
But the better you make the timeliness, accuracy, and scope of data available to legitimate users, the greater its value to intruders as well. As the rewards rise for unauthorized access, the potential also rises for damage to the image and
effectiveness of the corporation whose confidentiality can be breached and whose data can be corrupted or misused.
Attributes Needed for Successful Security
Protecting against such misuse is made more complex by the diversity and sheer size of the user communities that can access business systems over the Internet.
Business and security systems designed to cope with this level of risk and complexity need to be
■ Scalable, to handle far more users and transactions than non-Internet systems, that is, millions rather than thousands,
■ Manageable, to automate, reliably and securely, the administrative tasks such as assigning each user an account and password, and handling all associated information the user may supply or want organized, and
■ Interoperable, to communicate or even integrate with the proprietary systems of customers, suppliers, partners, and others,
enabling outsourcing to acquire supplies and collaboration to provide services.
These requirements demand designs based on widely-accepted standards such as Java, C, and XML. Only then can security mechanisms deployed in e-business systems have the flexibility and interoperability to work easily with multiple systems, thin clients, and multitier architectures.
Hosted Systems and Exchanges
Secure hosting and data exchange can enable economical, secure partitioning of data access by customer or by user, while supporting secure data sharing among communities of interest. Oracle9i Application Server makes this possible through support for a public key infrastructure and enterprise user security.
The principal security challenge of hosting is keeping data from different hosted user communities separate. Providing separate systems for each hosted community has the disadvantage of requiring separate installation, configuration, and
Promises and Problems of the Internet
management for each hosted user community. This solution provides little in the way of economies of scale to a hosting company.
Using Oracle 9iAS provides several factors that can greatly reduce costs to hosting service providers. These factors include mechanisms that allow multiple user communities to share a single hardware and software instance, that securely separate data for different user communities, and that provide a single administrative interface to service all the hosted communities.
Similar considerations support the requirements that exchanges have for both data separation and data sharing. For example, an exchange may ensure that a supplier’s bid remains unviewable by other suppliers, yet allow all bids to be evaluated by the entity requesting the bid. Furthermore, exchanges may also support "communities of interest" in which groups of organizations can share data selectively, or work together to provide such things as joint bids.