You’ve open sourced your relational database manager with PostgreSQL – but how can you keep it secure?

October 20, 2020 TH Author

Webcast There was a time when open source was still – no matter how many decades it had driven software projects – regarded as the playground of hippies and utopians. Bold and brave, yet thrown together, inconsistent and unsecured when compared to more established products.

But as incumbent vendors saw sense and bolted open source offerings onto their product load-outs, or even acquired celebrated open source gathering spots outright, open source suddenly became cool. Normal, even.

For relational databases, and the systems that managed them, this was a smile and nod moment. As early pioneers of open source, there are feature-packed, hugely portable and keenly developed options available for anyone wishing to leave behind a big old vendor, enormous annual fees, and cunningly-constructed vendor lock-in.

All of this can belong to anyone – and it’s available right now. There’s just one catch: Some of those general perceptions around open source remain. While it’s increasingly accepted that “throwing together” code from disparate sources is fine, and sometimes even good, in order to innovate with agility, making an open-source RDBMS fully secure can still be a sticking point. From those developing the project to senior leadership and board directors, everybody’s going to have one eye on a possible security disaster.

This is what we’ll be thinking about in an upcoming webcast. Taking the venerable PostgreSQL as our open-source RDBMS of choice, we’ll be thinking about best practice to successfully manage risk when opening up your relational databases to a more agile future.

Successfully locking it down requires a number of approaches, ranging from doing the technical legwork all the way to stimulating your organisation’s culture to help the process along.

On 11th November 2020 at 3pm GMT, The Register’s Tim Philips will be joined by Marc Linster from PostgreSQL experts EnterpriseDB to pass on the wisdom Marc’s acquired in working with organisations large and small to successfully deliver open-source RDBMS.

Tim and Marc will look closely into how DBAs and dev teams can better collaborate to make the dream happen, how standardisation and automation of functions can improve secure processes, how a good balance of migration and new deployments can help the cause, and how a spot of evangelising the project across the organisation can’t hurt, either.