Critical Assessment of Auditing Contributions to Effective and Efficient Security in Database Systems

Database auditing has become a very crucial aspect of security as organisations increase their adoption of database management systems (DBMS) as major asset that keeps, maintain and monitor sensitive information. Database auditing is the group of activities involved in observing a set of stored data in order to be aware of the actions of users. The work presented here outlines the main auditing techniques and methods. Some architectural based auditing systems were also considered to assess the contribution of auditing to database security. Here a framework of several stages to be used in the instigation of auditing is proposed. Some issues relating to handling of audit trails are also discussed in this paper. This paper also itemizes some of the key important impacts of the concept to security and how compliance with government policies and regulations is enforced through auditing. Once the framework is adopted, it will provide support to database auditors and DBAs.