Architecture and Deployment Concepts

Oracle Database Security Central is built on a scalable, integrated architecture that unifies data collection, activity monitoring, risk analysis, policy enforcement, and security intelligence across the database environment. This architecture allows the platform to collect and correlate information from many sources, apply security policy, and deliver insight through the Security Control Center.

Architectural Continuity from Audit Vault and Database Firewall

The architecture of Oracle Database Security Central is a direct evolution of the proven Oracle AVDF architecture. The core components carry forward.

  1. The Audit Vault Server continues as the central repository and management system and now hosts the Security Control Center. Audit Vault Server is referred as Server now.

  2. Audit Vault Agents and agentless collection mechanisms continue to support flexible collection across database audit trails, operating system logs, directory sources, and custom formats.

  3. The Database Firewall continues to provide grammar-based SQL traffic inspection with proxy, host-based, and out-of-band deployment options.

Database and Platform Support

Oracle Database Security Central supports a wide range of database platforms for activity monitoring and audit collection. Supported platforms include Oracle Database, including Exadata, Real Application Clusters, Data Guard, and Multitenant pluggable databases, as well as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, IBM Db2 for LUW, and SAP Sybase. MariaDB and EnterpriseDB are supported through the QuickCSV collector.

Operating system audit trails are supported for Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and IBM AIX. Custom audit sources in XML, JSON, and CSV formats are also supported.

Deployment Options

Oracle Database Security Central is delivered as a pre-configured software appliance that can be deployed on x86 hardware supported by Oracle Linux. It supports deployment on on-premises infrastructure, in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using marketplace images, and in AWS and Microsoft Azure environments.

This flexibility allows organizations to deploy Security Central where their databases and compliance requirements dictate while maintaining a single unified security console. Because the platform is customer-managed and deployed within the customer’s own environment, the organization retains full control over its audit data and an independent record of activity on databases hosted elsewhere.

Availability, Scale, and Data Lifecycle

High availability is provided using Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) with automatic failover. Horizontal scalability and parallel processing support large and growing database fleets. Agent updates are applied automatically, which removes administrator involvement in keeping collection components current.

Data lifecycle management policies can be defined per target, specifying online and offline retention periods. Activity data is moved automatically from the Server to archive storage according to those policies, and archived data can be restored when it is needed for investigation or audit.