This is a reprint of an article on MinionWare.net. I’m posting this here because I believe in this software, and because some of you may well need it. -Jen
The webinar “Audit SQL Server Security” has passed. Watch the recording here! You can also contact our team at Sales@MinionWare.net for questions, personalized demos, and a trial.
SQL Server audits come in many forms.
There’s the basic inventory, “what exactly do we have and what versions?” audit, for general use and SQL Server licensing.
Recurring security audits, which are an excellent idea in this day of hackers and attackers and random employees dropping your custom views (I’m looking at you, Steve-in-accounting).
Compliance audits, where you have to check off a number of criteria for every single SQL Server instance in your shop.
And, there are the deeply painful audits, where – for some unholy, unknowable reason – the auditor requires screenshots of all security screens. All of them. Every login and user on all 25 (or 150, or 500) instances.
Audit SQL Server much, much faster
Minion Enterprise cuts your audit time by 90% or more. We’ll show you some great examples in our February 19 webinar, which you should sign up for. But let’s talk about this here, too.
The whole point of automation and centralization is to free you up from the drudge work. To give you time to pursue your ongoing SQL education, do code reviews, to create. As necessary as they are, audits are definitely drudge work that needs to be audited. So we did, with Minion Enterprise.
M.E. keeps a basic inventory for you – you enter the server names into the dbo.Servers table, and the system runs out to get all the meta-info it can about that instance: version, edition, cores, memory, disk, databases, objects, security, and on and on.
Recurring security audits are a whole lot easier, because all the data is in one place. A couple of queries, and you’re done. Better still, M.E. comes with alerts installed. New person gets sysadmin on any server? You get an alert, even if it was a Windows login that got sysadmin through Active Directory group memberships. (Oh yeah…M.E. gets you AD info, too.)
We’ve completely coded in some compliance audits, with more on the way. For those, just run a single stored procedure, and you’re done.
The deeply painful audits are automated, too. Automated, my friends.
Watch the recording here! And, feel free to contact our team at Sales@MinionWare.net with any questions or comments.