The support could improve.

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The performance of Oracle Audit Vault could be improved, especially in handling large data collections and generating reports on time. Additionally, the efficiency of queries for retrieving information from the database needs improvement, particularly in large-scale environments.

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I believe that we can always customize according to our needs. More custom reports, some confidential options, and sorting reports are some of the features which can be enhanced. 

Some issues pop up when we limit our operating system's assessment. However, all the customization and tweaking might be a bit of a challenge when trying to integrate the solution. They should simplify the integration and work with different vendors and mechanisms.

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Different things should be improved: 

• The migration from an old version to a newer version is not that easy
•  Database grouping also should be improved, and
• The reporting.

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There are features available in Imperva that are not included in Oracle Audit Vault. It would be helpful to have more features added.

Stability could be improved, we have had some challenges

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Currently, you need two servers: one for Audit Vault and one for the firewall. If they can combine them into one server, it will be great because it is costly to have two servers. It will also make its installation easier. I have heard that in the new version, there will be only one server for both.

I use it only for security purposes, and they can continue to improve it with more security tools and features. It should be powerful like FortiGate. When it becomes powerful like FortiGate, people will only go for this solution for their infrastructure.

Their support could be faster.

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Large scope of improvements:

• A method to group targets (databases generating audit files) logically is missing; for example, PROD, QA, UAT & DEV targets.
• An alert mechanism based on logical grouping is missing.
• A simplified graphic mechanism for the management team.
• Remote start and stop of the Audit Vault collector agent.
• Sophisticated audit file management tools to control growth of audit files on the target server.

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This kind of solution should supply more analytical data for the traffic that comes in. I think that that side is not as strong as some other products. However, it is stronger in other areas and superior in some ways for security. The Oracle product monitors the database and not the operating system as well which is an area that can use improvement.

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The price factor makes it “out of reach" for small players in the IT industry. Even the SaaS model is very expensive. SaaS is an alternative hosting model where Oracle hosts the audit vault in their data center and installs audit collection agents on client data center. They host these appliances in their HIPAA-complaint data center where all controls are active. They work with the client to set-up secure channels for audit data and then sign BAA with the client. This auditing feature is made available as a service for which Oracle charges on a pro-rated basis.

Also, Audit Vault is not yet licensed to run with Other Cloud offerings like Amazon AWS, which makes it difficult to implement incase your existing tech-stack is on AWS or any other non-Oracle-Cloud Infrastructure.

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I hear from many people that say IBM Guardian is better than Oracle Audit Vault when it comes to performance. IBM Guardian works transparently in the database, but Oracle Audit Vault consumes some ratios on the server. The configuration for the solution can be complicated as well.

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We were using Audit Vault 10.3 before and could not migrate to the new version (AVDF 12.1 and 12.2) (because Oracle support said it was not possible) and we continued to get old Audit Vault databases when we needed old audit records, and we could not remove our dependency. Audit records can be migrated from the old system to the new system.

To be able to produce intelligent reports, the ability to analyze the reports must be given.

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The reporting is an area of the solution that needs to be improved.

Customized reporting is something that we are struggling with, and it is quite tough for us. Every time we need to prepare a custom report, we have to involve the vendor. This is unlike other solutions where the reports are easy to customize.

Another problem with reporting emerges on the topic of compliance and certain international standards. The standard set of reports do not provide sufficient details for the PCS and ISO standards.

It is important to have better integration with most of the tools to manage unstructured data or SIM solutions. If we change vendors for our SIM then we want to have the best possible support.

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One of the biggest challenges that we are facing is the inability to use more than one account for the platform, so the whole organization cannot make their own compliance audits at their own pace. I think that's one feature that really is giving us a bit of a problem. That is one of our biggest challenges.

The fact that it doesn't audit the network is also quite a downfall for the product. Maybe it should be improved to allow one to log on to network devices and do audits to check compliance at that level.

Finally, the ability to integrate with well-known applications like SAP, Microsoft, and common ERP would be helpful. If it included templates that are used for audits that can be used in those platforms and checking compliance, that would be really helpful, because half the time there isn't enough documentation to help someone check the compliances of specific applications. The second bit is the ability to audit middleware, like application servers and spatial and detection platforms. That is quite lacking in this product.

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Policy defining should be more user-friendly. It still should be implemented and handed over to the end users. This policy defining cannot be done by an end user. It should be implemented initially, by a person who knows the Audit Vault along with the implementing business organization and their audit requirements. There should be a system analysis carried out and then this should be implemented. If the Oracle Audit Vault can give the administration interface to the end user itself, then he/she could generate the reports that they need, just by creating the customized report formats.

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One feature that was missing when we tried to update was the network activity analyzer. We found a request going through the database file before reaching the database. 

We don't have a database file in the middle. If it's possible to have that database file to analyze what's going on inside the network, it would be better.

Some of our customers were asking about the latency. When the application wants to get to the database, the database file is going to give some latency in operations.

The additional features we need are to be able to have the database firewall to scan the network to get the information from the database. 

I also want the database firewall to be able to block services with more granularity.

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I would like to see a link-state tracking feature that quickly notices network failures. The benefit would be quick detection of network disconnection in DPE (inline) mode. If there is a network disconnection inline configuration, AVDF notices the network failure, but it cannot pass a link-state to the other side of the network (NIC). The problem currently is that handling of network failure cannot be performed correctly (depending on the point of failure).

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We would like to see the ability to administer and manage the solution through Enterprise Manager 13c, and development of the dashboards that are generally missing.

The system needs to be easy to manage, especially in terms of space management.

There is little to no technical references and use cases pointing to the resolution of technical challenges during implementation. Better documentation would be helpful.

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Although Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall serves as a critical detective and preventive control to protect against the abuse of legitimate access to databases responsible for almost all data breaches and cyber attacks, using Database Firewall to identify and capturing audit logs of real users, especially on applications using generic users to access the database, is an uphill task. More so, to correlate suspicious SQL to the originating end user.

Reduces the complexity of setting up the appliance, especially on large application systems with generic users using CLIENT_IDENTIFIER on the database to capture audit trails.

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I see room for improvement in almost all areas. The most important area is with custom reports. It was extremely difficult to create a report. The process to customize the reports requires a lot of research into how to code it. It takes advanced coding skills and is not intuitive. I couldn’t get them to work and I have a background in code writing.

The page for creating custom reports didn’t have an interface. The default reports did not suit our needs. There was no easy way to create reports – I had to look at the code that created the default reports and figure out how to change them to get the information we needed.

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Right now, the ownership of the database is automatically given to the database administrator. I would like to have a software solution, separate from the Oracle product itself, to assign ownership of the database to a specific team, being our security team, rather than the default owner.

One feature that is missing is the ability to have a secret server that is always encrypted. I would like to see this in the next release of this solution.

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According to Oracle, the best practice is that Audit Vault Server and DB Firewall should be deployed on different boxes (servers). There is no option to co-locate them together. If you wish to deploy AV server and Database Firewall, you will need two servers; one dedicated to Database Firewall and the other dedicated to AV Server.

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There were some bugs in beginning. Oracle has given us some patches for that. Now, we also have the Audit Vault and Database Firewall Product version 12c in the market with more features.

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I am not sure for the latest version but for previous versions, there were some configuration bugs when connecting Audit Vault Agent with Audit Vault Server.

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An easy, friendly user interface would be nice to have, since this would enable administrators to identify important events with a prompt response.

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All departments of this product need to be improved.

The goal of the project was to audit the operation of the departments. However, the other departments, such as sales and finance, were audited during the project too.

We began to audit the database transactions of the operations department software. We saw that it was good. We then implemented the audit in the software for the other departments as well.

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I would like to see better DB firewall documentation. We still don't understand how to configure the DB firewall.

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This product should improve capturing more auditing information for database sessions that connect via applications and also through database links. When the database sessions are generated from the applications that use database links from other databases, by nature the target database won't capture relevant information of the remote sessions. Also in the audit trails, it is of utmost importance who are the data consumers so as to track and control the appropriate use of the information.

There is need to improve capturing of more auditing information for OS logins as well.

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The underlying Mechanism for collect SQL statements (REDO collector) is still based on Oracle Streams technology. Data in Audit Vault needs to Selected properly and purged at regular intervals else it grows too much to manage. Increases network traffic especially between Audit Vault Server and Source Databases. View full review »