Question

Company Selected : Apple Inc.

Part 1:

Create the data section of your strategic plan. Define what your data looks like, describe your data warehouse. Explain the results from data mining tools (what BI would come out of the process).

Part 2:

Provide an example of data security – what security access would be needed for an accounting clerk compared to a senior manager?

Include a title page and 3-5 references.

Answer 1

Operational systems and data warehouses provide separate data stores. A data warehouse’s data store is designed to support queries and applications for decision-making. The separation of a data warehouse and operational systems serves multiple purposes: • It minimises the impact of reporting and complex query processing on operational systems. • It preserves operational data for reuse after that data has been purged from the operational systems. • It manages the data based on time, allowing the user to look back and see how the company looked in the past versus the present. • It provides a data store that can be modified to conform to the way the users view the data. • It unifies the data within a common business definition, offering one version of reality. A data warehouse assists a company in analysing its business over time. Users of data warehouse systems can analyse data to spot trends, determine problems and compare business techniques in a historical context. The processing that these systems support include complex queries, ad hoc reporting and static reporting (such as the standard monthly reports that are distributed to managers).

Security Requirements

Adding security features affect the performance of the data warehouse, therefore it is important to determine the security requirements as early as possible. It is difficult to add security features after the data warehouse has gone live.

During the design phase of the data warehouse, we should keep in mind what data sources may be added later and what would be the impact of adding those data sources. We should consider the following possibilities during the design phase.

• Whether the new data sources will require new security and/or audit restrictions to be implemented?

• Whether the new users added who have restricted access to data that is already generally available?

This situation arises when the future users and the data sources are not well known. In such a situation, we need to use the knowledge of business and the objective of data warehouse to know likely requirements.

The following activities get affected by security measures −

• User access
• Data load
• Data movement
• Query generation

User Access

We need to first classify the data and then classify the users on the basis of the data they can access. In other words, the users are classified according to the data they can access.

Data Classification

The following two approaches can be used to classify the data −

• Data can be classified according to its sensitivity. Highly-sensitive data is classified as highly restricted and less-sensitive data is classified as less restrictive.

• Data can also be classified according to the job function. This restriction allows only specific users to view particular data. Here we restrict the users to view only that part of the data in which they are interested and are responsible for.

There are some issues in the second approach. To understand, let's have an example. Suppose you are building the data warehouse for a bank. Consider that the data being stored in the data warehouse is the transaction data for all the accounts. The question here is, who is allowed to see the transaction data. The solution lies in classifying the data according to the function.

User classification

The following approaches can be used to classify the users −

• Users can be classified as per the hierarchy of users in an organization, i.e., users can be classified by departments, sections, groups, and so on.

• Users can also be classified according to their role, with people grouped across departments based on their role.

Classification on basis of Department

Let's have an example of a data warehouse where the users are from sales and marketing department. We can have security by top-to-down company view, with access centered on the different departments. But there could be some restrictions on users at different levels. This structure is shown in the following diagram.

Impact of Security on Design

Security affects the application code and the development timescales. Security affects the following area −

• Application development
• Database design
• Testing