Hardening the Infrastructure

When applications and databases are installed today, they start in a state that is often configured to help the user become productive as quickly as possible. As such, one of the first things you should do to protect yourself is to tighten your configurations against attacks—also referred to as hardening. An important aspect of this process is that everything needs to be hardened. For example, paying attention to just the network security while forsaking the operating system security is not a good idea. Security extends from the infrastructure components to the applications themselves. The old saying is true: a chain is as strong as its weakest link.

The following sections suggest ways to harden your systems. It’s important to understand the hardening process for the operating system, the network, and application server because the database ultimately depends on and interacts with all three of these components.