Oracle Recovery Service now offers retention lock

 Oracle DB Recovery Service recently added a new feature to protect backups from being prematurely deleted, even by a tenancy administrator.  This new feature adds a retention lock to the Backup Retention Period at the policy level. The image below shows the new settings that you see within the protection policy.

Enabling retention lock

The recovery service comes with some default policies that appear as "oracle defined" policy types

Name            Backup retention period

Platinum            46 days

Gold                   65 days

Silver                 35 days

Bronze               14 days

These policies can't' be changed, and they do not enable retention lock.

In order to implement a retention lock you need to create a new protection policy or  update an existing user defined protection policy.

Step #1 Set/Adjust "Backup retention period"

If you are creating a new "user defined" protection policy, you need to set the backup retention to a number of days between 14 and 95.  You should also take this opportunity to adjust the backup retention of an existing policy, if appropriate, before it is locked.

NOTE: Once a retention lock on the protection policy is activated (discussed in step #3), the backup retention period cannot be decreased, it can only be increased.

Step #2 Click on "enable retention lock"

This step is pretty straightforward. But the most important item to know is that the retention lock is not immediately in effect.  Much like the "retention lock" that is set on object storage, there is a minimum period of at least 14 days before the lock is "active".

 Note: Once the grace period has expired for the policy (explained later in this blog post) the  "retention lock"  is permanent and cannot be removed.

Step #3 Set "Scheduled lock time"

As I said in the previous step, the lock isn't immediately active. In this step you set the future date/time  that the lock time becomes active, and this Date/Time must be at least 14 days in the future.  This provides a grace period that delays when the lock on the policy becomes active. You have up until the lock activation date/time to adjust the scheduled lock time further into the future if it becomes necessary to further day lock activation.

Grace Period 

I wanted to make sure I explain what happens with this grace period so that you can plan accordingly.

• If you change an existing "user defined" policy to enable the retention lock, any databases that are a member of this policy will not have locked backups until the scheduled lock date/time activates the lock.  

• If you add databases to a protection policy that has a retention lock enabled, the backups will not be locked until whichever time is farther in the future.
• Scheduled lock time for the policy if the retention lock has not yet activated.
• 14 days after the database is added to the protection policy.

• Databases can be removed from a retention locked protection policy during this grace period.

• If the policy itself is still within it's grace period from activating, the backup retention period can be adjusted down for the protection policy.

NOTE: This 14 day grace period allows you to review the estimated space needed.  On the protected database summary page, for each database, you can see the "projected space for policy"  in the Space Usage section.  This value can be used to estimate the "locked backup" utilization.

What happens with a retention lock ?

Once the grace period expires the backups for the protected database are time locked and can't be prematurely deleted.  

The backups are protected by the following rules.

1. The database cannot be moved to another policy. No user within the tenancy, including an administrator can remove a database from it's retention enabled policy.  If it becomes necessary to move a database to another policy , an SR needs to raised, and security policies are followed to ensure that this is an approved change.

2.  There is always a 14 day grace period in which changes can be made before the backups become locked. This is your window to verify the backup storage usage required before the lock activates.

3. Even if you check the "72 hour termination option" on the database, backups are locked throughout the retention window.

Comments:

This is a great new feature that protects backups from being deleted by anyone in the tenancy, including tenancy administrators.  This provides an extra layer of security from an attack with compromised credentials.  Because the lock is permanent, always use the 14 day grace period to ensure the usage and duration is appropriate for you database.

Cyber Vault Characteristics

 One topic that has been coming up over and over this year is Cyber Vault. In this post I am going to through the characteristics I commonly see when a customer build a Cyber Vault.  The image below gives you a good idea of what is involved.

Characteristics of a Cyber Vault

• NTP and DNS services.: Because a Cyber Vault is often isolated from the rest of the datacenter it is critical to have NTP service.  Proper time management is critical to ensuring backups are kept for the proper retention.  DNS isn't critical, but it is definitely very helpful in configuring infrastructure.  In many cases "/etc/hosts" can get around this, but is a pain to maintain.

• Firewalls:  Configuring firewalls, and isolated networks is critical to ensure the Cyber Vault is isolated.  The vault is often physically in the same datacenter, with network isolation providing the protection.  Be sure to understand what ports, networks, and traffic direction is utilized on all infrastructure so you can proper set firewall rules.

• Air Gap:  Creating an Air-Gap has become the standard to protect backups in the Cyber Vault. The Air Gap is often open for only a few hours a day at random times to ensure that the opening isn't predictable.  To limit the exposure time, it is critical to maximize the networking into the vault, and minimize the amount of data necessary to transfer.

 NOTE: Not all customers choose to have an Air Gap.  Having an Air Gap that is closed for long periods of times ensures there is less chance of intrusions, BUT it guarantees long periods of data loss when a restoration is performed.  This is most critical to decide with databases that are always changing.

• Break-the-glass: There needs to be control on who gets access into the vault, and an approval process to ensure that all access is planned and controlled.

• Backup validation: There needs to be a validation process in a vault to ensure that the backups are untouched.  When the backups contain executables, this is typically scanning for ransomware signatures. When backups are Oracle Backups, performing  "Restore Database Validate" is the gold standard for validating backups.

• Clean Room: A clean room is an environment where backups can tested, This can be a small environment (a server or 2) or it can be large enough to restore and run the whole application.

• Monitoring and reporting infrastructure : For Oracle this OEM (Cloud Control). It is critical that any issues are alerted and reported outside the vault.

• Audit Reports: Audit reports are critical to ensuring that the backups in the Cyber Vault are secured.  Audit reports will capture any changes to the environment, and any issues with the backups themselves.

BONUS: One thing that customers don't often think about is encryption keys.  Implementing TDE on Oracle Databases is an important part of protecting your data from exfiltration. But you should also ensure that you have a secure backup of you encryption keys in the Vault.

OKV (Oracle Key Vault) is the best way of managing the keys for Oracle databases.