DBTA E-EDITION
January 2008
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Trends and Applications
High-profile Internet security violations are on the evening news every week. Although the publicized computer break-ins seem to command the most attention, a wide range of other Internet violations and computer crimes now populate the IT landscape. An array of stakeholders - ranging from those in the executive suite to customers to regulators - are increasingly coming to view data as one of the most critical assets of the enterprise and the pressure is growing to treat it as such.
There is perhaps no area within database administration more time-consuming or fraught with difficulty as the need to accurately shepherd the varied and ongoing vectors of change across an organization's database infrastructure. A typical company has hundreds of databases, each with thousands of database objects, instantiated across multiple environments. The process of database change management touches many different people in the organization, including analysts, architects, modelers, developers, and DBAs; it also invokes common umbrella functions, such as change management, corporate security, data governance and SOA.
Efficiently sharing and managing the backup of data are common problems facing every organization, especially those with multiple, geographically-dispersed sites. Providing an adequate solution to both problems can be a vexing challenge. Businesses are under increased pressure from users and from auditors to facilitate secure, reliable, and auditable data transfer with near instantaneous access, data reliability, version coherency, and file security.