Anker

Anker: Transforming Database Governance with NineData — From Bastion Hosts to NineData

How NineData Helps Anker Unify Multi-Cloud Database Management and Data Replication

INDUSTRY

Consumer Electronics & Smart Hardware

DATABASES

PRODUCTS USED

Database Management

SQL Audit & Risk Control

Data Replication

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Challenges

Solutions

Architecture

Customer Overview

Challenges

As Anker managed its databases and supported global business operations, it faced four key challenges.

High Management Costs and Slow Tool Updates with TradditionalBastion Hosts

As the number of database types and versions continued to grow, managing different database systems through traditional bastion hosts created ongoing maintenance overhead and version compatibility challenges.

High resource and labor costs: Multiple database types, ircluding MySQL,Oracle, and MongoDB, were managed through separate bastion host tools. The operations team had to maintain multiple toolsets, resulting in higher operationaloverhead.
Difficult tool updates: When self-hosted databases were upgraded to newer versions, such as MySQL 8.0 or Oracle 19c, the associated bastion host tools could not always adapt in time, reducing operational efficiency.

Inefficient Account and Data Security Governance

Database operations involve queries, data exports, schema changes, and other activities. Without centralized operation records and risk control mechanisms, database governance becomes more complex.

Insufficient auditing capabilities: Database operation logs were scattered across systems, with no centralized SQL execution records or auditing of data export activities.
Limited control over change risks: Database DDL operations and data deletion activities lacked approval workflows, making it difficult to identify high-risk activities in time, such as deleting all records from a table.

Insufficient Auditing and Limited Control over Change Riskss

In an environment with multiple users and databases, account provisioning, permission revocation, and sensitive data protection require more effective management mechanisms.

Manual account management: Read / write and read-only database accounts had to be created manually, increasing the risk of permission errors and making it difficult to promptly revoke access when employees left the organization.
Inadequate sensitive data protection: Sensitive information, including user and order data, lacked effective identification and data masking controls.

Fragmented Tools and High Costs for Multi-Cloud, Multi-Source Data Replication

Beyond day-to-day database governance, Anker's global operations across multiple countries and regions created additional requirements for data migration and replication across cloud environments and geographic regions.

Geographically distributed data and complex replication requirements: Anker's business spans more than 180 countries and regions, including Europe, the United States, Southeast Asia, and mainland China. This creates demand for data migration and replication across multiple clouds and regions.
Security risks in cross-border data movement: Cross-border and cross-application data replication can increase the risk of exposing sensitive data during transmission and downstream use.

NineData Solutions

To address these challenges, NineData provides unified database management, SQL auditing and risk control, account and permission governance, sensitive data protection, and cross-cloud data replication capabilities. These capabilities help Anker manage complex database environments and data flows more effectively.

Unified Database Management and Version Compatibility

Centralized management platform: NineData replaces traditional bastion host tools with a unified management platform that centrally manages multiple database types, including MySQL, Oracle, and MongoDB. It provides a single operational interface and reduces tool maintenance costs.
Automatic version compatibility: NineData's built-in database protocol parsing engine stays compatible with updates to mainstream database versions, reducing the need for manual adaptation.

Enhanced SQL Auditing and Change Risk Control

End-to-end auditing: NineData records SQL operations, including queries, exports, and changes, and supports traceability by user, IP address, time, and other dimensions to help meet compliance requirements.
Intelligent risk interception: With more than 200 built-in risk rules, NineData automatically identifies high-risk operations, such as updates without a WHERE clause and changes to large tables, and can trigger approval workflows or block operations in real time.

Unified Account Governance and Sensitive Data Protection

Automated account governance: NineData provides a comprehensive role-based access control (RBAC) model. By integrating with the enterprise's centralized identity and authentication system, it enables granular permissions for data sources, databases, tables, sensitive fields, and platform functions, reducing the need to maintain multiple database accounts.
Sensitive data identification and masking: NineData supports automatic sensitive data identification and masking, obscuring fields such as phone numbers and email addresses in query results (for example, + 1 212-****-5678).

Unified Cross-Cloud and Cross-Region Data Replication

NineData Edge Clusters: NineData Edge Clusters enable regionally deployed data replication across different clouds and geographic regions, with centralized management. A single replication tool supports data migration and replication across different clouds, regions, and database types.
Sensitive data filtering: Using the ETL capabilities of NineData Data Replication, sensitive data can be excluded during replication to reduce the risk of sensitive data leakage.

Architecture

To address the challenges of managing multiple database types, strengthening database security governance, and replicating data across clouds and regions, Anker uses NineData to establish a unified database management and data replication system. The following architecture diagram illustrates how NineData supports Anker's database management and data replication workflows.

Anker Solution Architecture

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