EYECARE CO: Building Security with a “Lights-Out” Process

PROBLEM
A major eye care company that provides products across 100 markets in 75 countries needed to produce security via a “lights-out” automated process. The company has thousands of eye care consultants who need role appropriate access to sales data delivered through Cognos.  The major hurdle to providing this information was securing the models and assuring that membership data was in sync with security in the ERP system.

The company needed to:

• Completely automate security for eight cube models;
• Synchronize memberships with those present in the ERP system;
• Build a nightly extensible process that could regenerate Transformer security and easily be adapted to new models;
• Incrementally add/delete thousands of membership changes;
• Provide recovery capability that could clear the entire environment of memberships should a major failure occur;
• Provide security for users of two different companies with accounts in two entirely different domains.

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SOLUTION    
Security 4X provided the following key benefits:

• Namespace Management is administered using Security 4X to drive thousands of membership changes with virtually no coding. By pointing Security 4X at a namespace that is populated with groups and memberships, Security 4X can make changes to groups or users in that namespace.  In this implementation, Security 4X doesn’t talk explicitly to any application deriving user data from the namespace, but overlays namespace management for all applications using that namespace.  
  
  
• Security updates are scheduled as part of a nightly refresh process.  The data is secured by rows and columns in a database or by dimensions, levels and members in a dimensional cube.  Dimensional Security can have two perspectives: 1) as an output, such as securing a cube, or 2) as an input, where your enterprise security model, however complex, is used to secure various targets.  To clarify, the differences between "Enterprise Security" and "Dimensional Security": “Enterprise Security” is the case where you use a complex set of parameters to define a [dimensional] enterprise security model.  "Dimensional Security" is the subset of data security where a dimensional source is secured rather than a relational source.
  
  
• Because you can control Security 4x by updating directly into the S4X database, (i.e. the database is open) you can automate much of the security process,  implementing a “lights out" process, which runs 24/7 with little human intervention.

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RESULT
Security 4X improves user administration, compliance and BI developer productivity by establishing:

• A scalable, 24/7 process that updates security with zero manual intervention;
• An extensible process that is adaptable to additional Transformer models;
• A process that manages thousands of users across separate Active Directory company domains;
• Full recovery in the event of system failure;
• Delivering comprehensive documentation addressing each aspect of the process.

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