IT Baseline Protection Manual - The Information Warfare Site

Other IT Components Telecommuting
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From the view of a user, a transaction will either be completed as a whole or not at all. If there is an
error or interruption, all changes made so far will be undone. This is ensured in the DBMS with
appropriate recovery measures.
- Consistency
All integrity conditions in the database are maintained. A transaction leads the database from a
consistent state into another consistent state. This can be ensured by appropriate synchronisation
mechanisms in the database.
- Isolation
Every transaction is isolated from all other transactions. This also implies that a transaction can
access only data that are part of a consistent state of the database.
- Durability
If a transaction has been reported to the user as successfully completed, all changes made in the
database will survive subsequent hardware or software failures (unless the database is destroyed as
a whole).
These requirements are fulfilled by almost all commercially available DBMS systems.
Database systems are based on standard commercial software offered by a variety of manufacturers.
The first step in acquiring a database for processing data is to select a suitable standard software
package. The related threats and safeguards stated in Chapter 9.1 Standard Software must also be
considered here.
Databases cannot be treated separately from the environment in which they are used. A stand-alone PC
is just as feasible as a mainframe or a network of Unix systems. For this reason, the threats and
safeguards described in Chapter 5 Non-networked systems, Chapter 6 Local Area Networks and
Chapter 7 Data Transfer Systems should be taken into consideration in accordance with the type of
environment involved. To prevent redundancies, this chapter does not repeat descriptions of threats
and safeguards unless they are of particular importance.
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IT-Baseline Protection Manual: Otober 2000