Monday, July 14, 2008

Audit Vault 10.2.3 now comes with built-in APEX

Audit Vault 10.2.3 was released recently, and from the APEX perspective one of the most important aspects is their new Reporting capabilities.

What is Audit Vault: (from OTN)

Satisfying compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and mitigating the risks associated with the insider threat are among the top security challenges businesses face today. Oracle Audit Vault turns audit data into a key security resource to help address today's security and compliance challenges.

Auditing is playing an increasingly important role in the areas of compliance, privacy, and security. Today the use of audit data as a security resource remains very much a manual process, requiring IT security and audit personnel to first collect the audit data, and then sift through enormous amounts of dispersed audit data using custom scripts and other methods. Oracle Audit Vault automates the audit collection and analysis process, transparently enforcing the principle of trust-but-verify.



A browse of the Online Documentation (Using Oracle Audit Vault Reports) should reveal very familiar screens for APEX developers. This is because Oracle Audit Vault have incorporated Interactive Reporting and Runtime-Only APEX capabilities to provide their users highly customizable reporting capabilities.

This is no coincidence as our development team worked very closely with the Audit Vault team to ensure we met their requirements. We had to push up the original timetable for introducing Interactive Reports to be able to meet Audit Vault's development timeframe. In fact some of the capabilities provided in Interactive Reporting Regions are a direct result of requirements from the Audit Vault team.

Personally I think this is great for Oracle Application Express as it helps to show that APEX is strategic to Oracle, given it is now a major component of a "for-cost" option of the Oracle Database. So to those people who say that APEX has a very limited shelf life, Oracle Audit Vault can be held up as a very good reason why APEX will be here for the long-haul. The other aspect is that it goes to showing how APEX can be utilized against very large datasets.

So next time your developing an Interactive Report to wow your users give a nod to the folks from Audit Vault for helping us to deliver a better solution to you.


Cheers,
David

2 comments:

Phil Winfield said...

David

One thing I picked up is that the screens are APEX but run only. I am presuming that an admin user can not login to provisioning and alter this to edit and then modify the pages too?

I'd like the ability to deploy commercial APEX apps like this too and wonder if this may be something we can expect in future?

Unknown said...

Phil,
There are already a number of commercial APEX apps available today.

See a listing of some of them on the APEX OTN Community & Partners pages (Commercail Apps).

There will also be a session at Oracle Openworld in September with a panel discussions with many of the creators of these applications (Building Commercial Software-as-a-Service Applications with Oracle Application Express) and other individual sessions here.