Insider Threats to Data – Often Overlooked Ben wrote in asking about insider threats – and what can be done to help protect your information against that type of access. If you’ve missed the last two editorials on security, grab the link at the top of this page, but we’re talking about protecting information with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), encryption, […]

Illegitimate Legitimate Access to Data One of the points I made in yesterday’s editorial was that TDE is great for data at rest, but it doesn’t help with "legitimate" access. A couple of people wrote asking what exactly that meant – legitimate access – I mean, surely there’s authorized access and "everything else," right? Well, sort of. You protect access […]

TDE vs. Cloud Provider Encryption of Database Information I wanted to share some information I sent over to a reader about TDE vs. Azure vs. provider-encrypted databases. Specifically how do you compare, and how do you choose. This particular reader is in the healthcare space, but the information is more about my own experiences and choices, and I thought I […]

Is an SLA Passe? (Spoiler: Yes.) The question of SLAs being helpful, at the hosting of your servers level anyway, is, I believe a done deal. It’s not helpful, it’s not useful and it’s simply going to give you false hopes of infrastructure, whereas you could be putting in place more robust options that would take care of failures by […]

Licensing Costs with SQL Server – Did You Know? It’s not easy to work through all of the costs for cloud providers. WIth the way things are priced out based on services, bandwidth usage, storage and the like, it’s a potentially pretty dizzying array of options and costs. It’s important, however, to make sure you think through the core costs […]

Understanding Key SQL Server Security Points I’ll be presenting a webcast this week on SQL Server security. We’ll be looking at the challenges of security, the points to consider, the items you need to consider for your checklist. The webcast is free, and I hope you’ll join me. Here’s a link to register (it’s free): https://www.vconferenceonline.com/event/regeventp.aspx?id=1140 One of the things […]

We need your input for research this month! Just a quick note. We’re launching our research services with information about the cloud, usage, industry trends and the like. We need your help though! Our goal is to do regular research reporting on topics we all work with – and then present you with the results, industry feedback and comments and […]

Not Everyone is an Expert Like You Are I don’t know if you’ve had the pleasure recently of setting up a system for a friend who is completely non-technical. While we’ve come a long way in the setup (I mean, seriously, Windows starts with "Hi."), there are still so many things that just aren’t clear like they should be. Heck, […]

Managing your skills and learning I wrote yesterday asking about how you stay current with your skills. How do you pick a direction, then keep on top of the changes in that direction. I talked too about the cloud, and how it is so interwoven into the technology pool you no-doubt do or will work with, that it’s clearly something […]

Your own direction: keeping current as a DBA I wanted to reach out to everyone today and see how you’re working through the huge directional swings with SQL Server (and databases in general). Yes, there certainly are common grounds, but let’s face it, it’s not just a database platform choice any more. You get the select from on-premise, cloud, hybrid, […]