Securing Your Data in Analysis Services - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 966

Overview
Your data has value, and as with any item of value it must be protected from
outside threats. Security is the set of techniques used to provide you that pro-
tection. Indeed, security is an important consideration in the area of business
intelligence. Think about it — the very keys to your company's profitability can
be surfaced through your data and analytical applications. Just as you secure
your personal belongings in a safe place, like a safe deposit box, you must se-
cure your corporate data and applications. In the real word, a safe deposit box
has a lock on it requiring a key for entry; only people to whom you give access
(provide the key) can actually open the secured object. These concepts map
directly onto Analysis Services security. Analysis Services provides you ways
to protect your data so that you can restrict access to only those users who are
authorized.
The environment within which you are working has a significant impact on the
security precautions you should take. In general, if a server is running within
the confines of a firewall it helps mitigate the external threats posed and
provides increased protection. Disabling unused services/features that can po-
tentially be exploited by hackers is yet another way to reduce risk. Running
servers under least-privilege accounts like the network service account also
helps ensure your system will not be compromised. Analysis Services provides
you the ability to enable or disable various features and run under least priv-
ilege accounts on the system as seen in Chapter 12 . In addition to these tech-
niques, you learnt additional core security features in Analysis Services that re-
strict access to unauthorized users (in Chapters 9 and 12 .)
In this chapter you learn about the security features in Analysis Services that
allow the administrator to define access permissions such as read or write to
objects in Analysis Services, followed by restricting access to sensitive data
only to those who are allowed to access the data. Restricting access to cube
and dimension data is done by specifying MDX expressions that define if the
member or cell can be viewed by the user. What better way to learn how to re-
strict the data than a real world scenario? You learn the functionality of restrict-
ing dimension and cell data by means of two scenarios.