Oracle India Launches “Oracle Database Security & Compliance Solution” for Banks in India

Automates and simplifies bank’s adherence to RBI’s IT compliance guidelines

India, New Delhi, 30 September 2009

Under the RBI guidelines, banks operating in India are required to secure and avoid misuse of high value consumer financial data such as those residing in but not limited to credit card and personal banking accounts. Keeping this requirement in mind, Oracle India has launched the “Oracle Database Security & Compliance Solution”. The solution will help banks in India to address risks in the area of data security, as identified by the Department of Banking Supervision (DBS), Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

The Oracle Database Security & Compliance Solution aims to enable banks to meet the compliance guidelines in a timely manner, with less administrative and IT integration expenditure. It will also help banks reduce the number of exceptions for non-compliance, a common occurrence during IT audit processes.

Private, public and most of the nationalised banks (including co-operative banks) can deploy this solution to help them implement preventive, detective and corrective controls in database management. In addition, the solution will monitor activities of the users and provide a strong preventive mechanism to deter unauthorized access.

The Oracle Database Security & Compliance Solution enforces security at the database level, checking all users and bank applications that access the database. These include a wide range of systems such as core banking, corporate banking, credit cards, loan management, call center technology, treasury management, asset management, systems and servers, network and storage. Since the solution builds controls at the data level, it makes it fundamentally very difficult for any component in the database ecosystem to bypass it.

Also, the manual security processes in the database control mechanisms, which are siloed and prone to human error, can be automated and simplified, improving the integrity of the system and protection of audit evidence. The Oracle Database Security & Compliance Solution enforces security at the database level, not at the application layer. As security rules are centrally controlled and not affected by application changes, this ensures that multiple applications, business processes and tools accessing the same set of data, do not bypass any data security policy.

The solution can be implemented by the bank’s IT/ IS (information security) team or through Oracle PartnerNetwork members (System Integrators) who serve as implementation partners.

Details

More than 80% of India’s banks run on Oracle Database. The Oracle Database Security & Compliance Solution consists of several Oracle Database products that have been combined to help banks comply with all the clauses related to Database Controls in the DBS audit checklist. They include:

§ Database Vault: provides strong administrative access control and real-time protection

§ Audit Vault: empowers organisations to satisfy / comply regulations and mitigate risk by automating audit collections and analysis process transparently enforcing the principal of trust through verification.

§ Label Security: classifies data and mediates access to data based on its classification (useful for multi-level security and mandatory access control processes)

§ Enterprise Management Packs: enables provisioning and patch automation, data masking, change management, diagnostic and tuning

Oracle Database Options are product enhancements that extend the power of Oracle Database to meet specific requirements in the areas of performance and availability, security and compliance, data warehousing, and manageability.

“IT adoption among banks in India has gone up in the last decade. As technology becomes affordable and strategic for business management, higher levels of computerization call for transparency and compliance requirements to be met. It is critical for banks, which serve as custodians of citizens’ money, to meet compliance regulations easily and with the right IT infrastructure,” said Sundar Ram, Vice President, Technology Sales Consulting, Oracle Asia Pacific. “The best part about the Oracle Database Security & Compliance Solution solution is that it can be easily integrated with the bank’s existing IT infrastructure.”