Databases is widely use in any business organization for them to store, manage and analyze various data that they collect in their daily operations. Various usage of database in business organization along with the key issues faced by them are discuss below. If you doesn’t know what is database and what it is use for, please kindly read this article in our blog.

First of all, they can use the database in their customer management in which they can use the database to store all the information related to their customers such as their accounts, contacts details, their leads and opportunities to the company in their daily operation. Other than that, the customer's information such as the date and amount of their last order, the total amount of their purchases for the last year, a list of their favorite products and the products they returned as well as the details of customer service calls also been collected and stored in the customer management database. Those information in the customer management database also can be used to manage marketing activities such as sales promotions, to export email addresses or to prepare shipping labels at any time the company wish to do so.

In addition to the customer management database, there is another type of database known as inventory tracking database in which it can help the business organization that dealing with inventories like retailers to manage the inventories or stocks of the products they sell. The inventory taking database can help the retailors to keep track of their inventory in their daily operation. For example, they can know how much inventory is still available in a warehouse, in a storage room and on store shelves. For more effective, they can Integrate the use of bar codes and scanners in the job of inventory taking to form a complete tracking system to monitor their products as they move from one place to another and updating the database so they never need to count the inventory in a warehouse again. Last but not least, an inventory taking database can also alert them when products and supplies are running short so that they can order more before they run out of essential stock items.

Other than that, the business organization also can use database to collect and store all the information about their employees in addition to their regular customers. They can use the database to collect and store the information like their employees’ hourly wage, salary or commission, tax withholding rates, year-to-date income and accrued vacation time. The employee benefits such as health insurance and retirement account contributions, can be also recorded in the database. By doing this, the organization will be able to simplify scheduling and prevent payroll errors.

            Last but not lease, a database also can help us in planning for the company’s  growth as all the databases has the features of generating reports based on the data collected and store in the database. It has the ability of analyzing input data and productivity tracking, to anticipating future trends and customers' needs. It can helps most of the business organizations in making various decision related to their business in addition to the marketing activities. Therefore, a robust database system is able to help them in planning a strategy for their company’s growth.

            Although database is very useful in the organization daily operation, it still cause lots of issues to its users in which we should pay attention to and finding ways to solve them. First of all, the most common issues that might happen in most of the business organization is deployment failures in which it is the most common and foremost cause for database failures. Although most business organization tend to have preliminary tests before deploying their databases, they often fall short in testing it properly. Most pre-deployment tests for databases just check the functionality whether the database is doing what it is supposed to do but they often fail to ensure that the database isn't doing anything that it's not supposed to do. Getting the work done is not enough, getting it done in the right way, without having any adverse impacts to the business, has to be ensured during database deployments. Therefore, during the process of deploying database we should ensure that the database is doing what it supposed and not supposed to do.

In the process of deploying database, we should adapting source control or cluster services like VCS. We should make sure that our database and all its schemas are in a source control, as this makes the deployment easier, more reliable, secure, and auditable. Source control also provides many essential features that will help to manage the complexity of databases as they grow in size and volume. Other than that, we should always have a snapshot of our data backup before we actually start the process of deploying our database. Regardless it is a new deployment or upgrading the existing databases, we should always make sure to have a snapshot of the data backup before we make any changes. By doing this way, our data will be safe no matter how the deployment goes. While doing the database deployment, we should deploy the script to a nonproduction environment first. In order to make sure that the database has been deployed in the right way, we should always test it in a trial or test environment first before implementing it in the production environment. This is because, by deploying the script to a nonproduction environment first can help us to identify and solve various types of errors that might be harmful to the production environment and next avoid the possibility of database failures in the production environment. In addition to that, we also should make use of the automatic scripting approach wherever possible while deploying the database. This is because, an appropriate automated scripting approach simplifies the database development and maintenance. This also makes it easy for us to track the changes in a database made, rollback whenever required, or even reorder the previous changes. Last but not least, we also should make a proper data classification before us actually deploying the database and filling it with data. It is essential to first properly classify the data based on its severity and sensitivity. This will not only make data retrieval and indexing easy but will also help us to monitor sensitive data in a better way.

After the database has been successfully deployed, it is very important to give only the required privileges or access to the right users or applications of the database. Most database disasters are often caused by privilege-based issues such as excessive or legitimate privilege abuse, privilege elevation, or unused privileges. Providing unnecessary access or privileges to the users or applications increases the attack surface of the databases. It is not an easy job for any business organization to deal with the privileges or access-based issues. It doesn’t just require the administrators to eliminate unnecessary excessive rights to the database, but it also needs them to constantly monitor the resources for any privilege-based abuses. Undertaking this task manually is possible for small businesses with a limited number of resources but, it is impossible for the large organization. Therefore, most organizations nowadays are deploying readymade software solutions to monitor the privileges of their employees and resources. In order to avoid intruders or hackers from exploiting the database vulnerabilities with the access privileges, the business organization should implement the right combination of intrusion-prevention systems (IPS) along with a query-level access control system such as Secure Sphere. Finally, to prevent legitimate privilege abuse, it is essential for any business organizations to understand the context of database access. By implementing proper policies to monitor the date and time of access as well as the location of client applications can help us in monitoring the legitimate database access privileges.

            Although only the required privileges or access are given to the necessary users or applications of the database by the database administrators , the SQL injection still become one of the serious database issues. The SQL injection is a common web and data-hacking technique, which involves placing malicious code in the database through vulnerable SQL data input channels. It is also one of the most popular vectors of attack for databases that might even completely destroy the database. In a typical SQL injection, a hacker or an intruder injects an unauthorized piece of SQL code or stored procedures into the database, typically through the web application’s input parameters. These injected statements are specifically meant to execute at the database level for malicious purposes such as data security breach or for destroying the data. In addition to that, the successful execution of an SQL injection can also give attackers unrestricted access to the entire database.

In order to prevent SQL injection, a balanced combination of intrusion-prevention system, query-level access control, and event correlation should be used in the daily operation of the organization. Other than that, the principal of least privilege has to be implemented at the database level. By doing this, the database still save from the SQL injection attacks although an intruder injects a harmful piece of code into the database as it does not get executed due to lack of privileges. Moreover, cleaning and validating the inputs from the users before sending it to a database can also help in preventing the SQL injection attacks. Another effective way of curbing SQL injections is to implement parameterized queries. A parameterized query uses a parameter instead of directly injecting the values. Implementing error messages or using stored procedures can add an extra layer of data abstraction for security and can aid in preventing SQL injections attacks.

            Although the database has been deployed successfully without any errors and all security measures has been taken to ensure the database failures and the unauthorized access to the database won’t happen in the organization daily operation, the chances of a database to be broken still high as there are hackers who comes up with a new vulnerability each day that allows attackers to crash, gain access control over, and exploit databases with vulnerabilities. Thankfully, most database vendors are keeping pace and are providing attack-resistant database services. Vulnerabilities like SQL command injections or database buffer overflows have gone down to a great extent as the vendors are being proactive or responsive in providing patches to vulnerabilities. These database vulnerabilities can be caused due to multiple reasons such as lack of proper data management, data leakage, unmanaged or uncategorized organizational data, as well as the lack of constant monitoring to the usage and access of the database. Therefore, database vendors need to identify these issues and roll out regular updates or patches to fix them. Therefore, all the business organizations should keep their databases patched regularly and make sure to have a constant monitoring of its functioning and access privileges in order to prevent hackers or intruders gaining access to their sensitive organizational data.

            Last but not lease, denial of services also can be consider as one of database issues that need to be take in the considerations by all the business organizations. It is a form of cyberattack wherein a hacker or an intruder prevents legitimate users from accessing certain resources or a service by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting the service host. A database is one of the common victims of a denial of service attack as the database is the place where all business organizations store all their sensitive data. Usually a hacker will overloads a company’s database with multiple requests or queries in a single time and this will consume almost all the system resources such as server’s and database’s memory, or the CPU processing power or even crashing a business website. As we all know, databases are the place where all business organization store all their sensitive data therefore, securing the company’s database should be a high priority in every industry. Each and every business organization should ensure their databases are properly configured and deployed as well as make sure that they leave no stones unturned in terms of security so that their databases remain safe, secure, and resistant to cyberattacks.

            In conclusion, although database is very useful in our daily lives especially in the business environments, various issues or problems still the exist in our daily lives especially in the daily operation of most of the business organization in which they will affect the profit of those business organization in the long term if the serious actions doesn’t taken by the respective organization to solve those issues or problems. Therefore, all the business organization should always alert of the existent of those issues or problems and take the appropriate actions to solve them so that their database will be in the good condition at all time.