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How Thick Is Your Security Blanket?

by: Troy Gottfried, Sr. BI Consultant, BECP

A Greek proverb reads, “First secure an independent income, then practice virtue.”  While that sounds like good advice in today’s volatile market, the gist of the proverb proves a valuable paradigm to follow in Enterprise security.  Perhaps we could rephrase the proverb as follows:  First secure your BI platform, then distribute content.

Contrary to popular belief, no one wants to keep users from accessing the information they need.  Many times, security is strict in order to simplify the administrative tasks necessitated by a complex platform.  In this article we take a brief look at the all of the components of the Enterprise platform that need attention with regard to security.

First and foremost, the reports, documents, and other content in Enterprise need to be secured.  Generally speaking, this is referred to as Folder and Object security.  The question we need to ask ourselves as Enterprise Administrators in this first step is, “Who needs access to which reports?”

Once the first question has been addressed (and documented), we follow up with, “What do they need to do with those reports?”  In Enterprise, we can run reports on demand, schedule reports, view instances, and even modify the content.  Satisfying this question allows us to easily modify our existing paradigm to add functionality to the way our users interact with those reports.

If our reports or documents are based on one of the two semantic layers available (Universes and Business Views), we now need to consider another level of security.  If a user or group is granted permissions to view the report, what information are they supposed to see on the report?  This requires extensive documentation and careful planning for a successful security implementation to work.  Across the two semantic layers, we can control accessibility to objects, rows, columns, tables, views and many other pieces of the underlying information layer.  It is not enough anymore to simply grant access to the appropriate reports without securing the information as well.

After successfully securing the content, we need to meet application security requirements.  Enterprise consists of many different applications, from Voyager, to Web Intelligence, to Desktop Intelligence, to Performance Manager and even InfoView.  There are even other applications that fit into the Enterprise platform.  Certain users will require more functionality than others with these applications.

If implemented correctly, a security paradigm that takes into account all of the above will serve both users and administrators well.  The most valuable aspect of implementing security is planning and documentation.  Wouldn’t you rather your security blanket be nice and warm?  Rest well.

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