Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd. (HPCL), a Global Fortune 500 company, has deployed a solution from Oracle to secure its crude oil import tendering operations, protecting its trade secrets and competitive bid information from unauthorized access. The solution leverages Oracle’s Audit Vault and Database Vault solutions to strengthen security and prevent competing bid information from ‘leaking.’
With a 16 million tones/year throughput, HPCL’s refineries’ procurement requirements are significant and timing and pricing of tenders plays a critical role in HPCL’s profit. During tendering, all bid information is submitted online via the web and stored in an Oracle database. This has been augmented with Oracle’s ‘Vault’ solution set to safeguard classified information on material quality, quantity, loading port, pricing period as submitted by some 60 international vendors. The solution protects confidential data from unauthorized access by any user—even privileged users such as DBAs. Audit Vault automates the collection and consolidation of audit data from all database servers. The security solution also helps HPCL address data governance requirements and increases the security of existing applications.
Further protection can be obtained by implementing Vault’s multi-factor access control based on time of day, IP address, application name, and authentication method, preventing unauthorized ad-hoc access and application by-pass. More from www.oracle.com.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2010 Issue # 6.
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