Secure Your Database Backups With Encryption

Customer and business data has increasingly become the target high-tech theft. Protecting sensitive data is important not only inside the enterprise but also as it travels outside the enterprise across networks and to offsite storage on backup media. Oracle provides robust support for encrypting entire database backups. Encryption is the only defense when it comes to protecting business data when it is transported on tape or disk to offsite storage for safekeeping. Oracle provides two solutions for encrypting database backups.

Oracle RMAN

Oracle RMAN can encrypt an entire database backup easily using one of these two methods:

	Oracle Transparent Data Encryption
	Passphrase

Available since Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle Transparent Data Encryption protects credit card data and other sensitive business information within the database. Oracle RMAN can encrypt the entire database backup using the same master key used by Transparent Data Encryption to encrypt columns and tablespaces.

Passphrases are ideal for customers who are not already encrypting data in the database and simply want their database backup encrypted. It is important to use a complex passphrase made up of characters and numbers to prevent a thief from easily breaking the encryption and reading the clear text data.

Oracle Secure Backup

Oracle Secure Backup (OSB) delivers tape data protection for the Oracle database and file systems in distributed UNIX, Linux, Windows and Network Attached Storage (NAS) environments. Integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM), Oracle Secure Backup is ideally suited for Oracle customers providing a familiar interface experience protecting the entire Oracle environment to tape. OSB is ideal for customers who backup directly to tape devices and want to encrypt their database backup. For more information, please refer to the Oracle Secure Backup page on OTN.