Use Cases for Transparent Sensitive Data Protection Policies

Transparent sensitive data protection has several benefits.

These benefits are as follows:

• You configure the sensitive data protection once, and then deploy this protection as necessary.You can configure transparent sensitive data protection policies to designate how a class of data (for example, credit card columns) must be protected without actually having to specify the target data. In other words, when you create the transparent sensitive data protection policy, you do not need to include references to the actual target columns that you want to protect. The transparent sensitive data protection policy finds these target columns based on a list of sensitive columns in the database and the policy’s associations with the specified sensitive types. This can be useful when you add more sensitive data to your databases after you have created the transparent sensitive data protection policies. After you create the policy, you can enable protection for the sensitive data in a single step (for example, enable protection based on the entire source database). The sensitive type of the new data and the sensitive type and policy associations determine how the sensitive data is protected. In this way, as new sensitive data is added, you do not need to configure its protection, as long as it meets the current transparent sensitive data protection policy’s requirements.

• You can manage protection of multiple sensitive columns. You can enable or disable protection for multiple sensitive columns based on a suitable attribute (such as the source database of the identification, the sensitive type itself, or a specific schema, table, or column). This granularity provides a high level of control over data security. The design of this feature enables you to manage data security based on specific compliance needs for large data sets that fall under the purview of these compliance regulations. You can configure data security based on a specific category rather than for each individual column. For example, you can configure protection for credit card numbers or Social Security numbers, but you do not need to configure protection for each and every column in the database that contains this data.

• You can protect the sensitive columns identified using the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Application Data Modeling (ADM) feature. You can use the Cloud Control ADM feature to create sensitive types and discover a list of sensitive columns. Then you can import this list of sensitive columns and their corresponding sensitive types into your database. From there, you can create and manage transparent sensitive data protection policies using this information.