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Re: Back and a Question

From: rjamya <rjamya_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 07:23:15 -0400
Message-ID: <9177895d0608170423g5c4bd632od38430060c581f7e@mail.gmail.com>


But here is the bottom line, completely disabling production access isn't possible in all cases. We for e.g. get daily twice data from a company that shall remain unnamed (for obvious reasons). That data contains TV ratings and occasionally, something is screwed up in their data that requires the responsible developer to go in and do manual cleanups because the data-load is extremely complicated and causes various aggregations to happen automatically. Or there is this overseas company that changes data format without telling any of their clients, that was a lot of fun.

Now one might say, you can do this in test and if successful then load into prod, but our end users know the time when this data becomes available in the company. and if they can't access in next 15 minutes, they pick up the phone and start yelling. It is a business requirements because they need to generate daily reports for people who pay their salary and make major decisions on rates/ratings etc.

An then again the lesser known phenomenon called "it-didn't-happen-on-my-watch" whereby (oxymoron warning) a perfectly developed and tested application breaks down in production when 1. Tiger wood is on the 12th hole and exactly in 72 hours there is a Full Moon
or
2. when DHS raises security alert to Mauve.

In these certain types of conditions we let developers shadow user's session but occasionally their managers let them in production as well. But since they all know that we audit all their actions, no one does any mischief. at-least none so far and they are pretty happy with the way things have been set-up. And they only get access to production with limited privileges to their own accounts, either using the application or using sqlplus. No other gui tools are allowed.

AFAIK, developers production access is NOT against SOX, it is just that when you put a control in, you document it, follow it, audit it to show that you did everything you said you would. You know auditors don't know everything about all businesses. If an old dog can be taught a new trick, so can be auditors 8:)

A friend of mine works for a financial company (not on the wall street), their developers have read only access to production every day, because they found out that, that helped them get issues fixed quickly.

Raj

On 8/17/06, Nuno Souto <dbvision_at_iinet.net.au> wrote:
>
>
> Narh. Knock-up a coupla screens in htmldb or other similar RAD tool,
> let them access data through an application interface, using a
> given uid and "canned" sql. Audit every last breath of that id.
>
> Last thing you want is a developer lose in a production system
> with sqlplus or worse: sqlnavigator or some such development tool.
>
> Or worse: an "educated" user with a tool like Toad or sqlnavigator:
> what stops that user from taking the entire schema, sql and pl/sql
> code and everything else easily available to their next job at
> one of your competitors? Ah yes: ethics? Sure!...
>

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Received on Thu Aug 17 2006 - 06:23:15 CDT

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