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Here's my first take on the description of what I mean by a Database Server. There are aspects, in this description, of environmental assumptions, security objectives, risk analysis, etc. It's in English, though, or at least tries to be. It's almost a short "use case".
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I'll follow with descriptions of the other profiles shortly.
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Your comments and suggestions welcome (at least until I see them ;-)
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Ed
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======================
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Database Server
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This is the classic raised-floor, big iron server, providing database processing resources to applications throughout the organization. It typically supports multiple database instances, possibly from multiple database technologies and vendors. Transactional semantics are typical, with different performance tuning parameters used as daily processing loads change from on-line transactional to batch update / reporting in nature.
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Access to such a machine is presumed to be limited to trusted application servers located within the same data center, or at least to be isolated from casual access from users and developers. No access from customers, competitors or hostile attackers is expected. User accounts on such a machine are limited to those needed by the operations staff and database administrators to install and maintain the operating system and databases, themselves. Information wearhouse and decision support center ad-hoc queries are only allowed to come through application servers (see 2.1.2, below) so as to make resource and performance management possible. Only privileged users, not necessarily root users, but trusted employees and contractors, have login privileges on the machine.
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All administrative and user actions with respect to the machine are candidates for audit capture, analysis and reporting. Business critical information is held on the machine which, if stolen or inadvertently published, could have material effect on the organizations financial performance, share price, or public reputation. Customer privacy-sensitive information, ranging from financial to health-care in nature, are likely to be held on such a server.
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