According to a recent survey conducted by CSO Magazine, two-thirds of respondents said their company did not have a well-defined company-wide security policy in place. Moreover, this survey found that employees have access to critical data when they don't necessarily need access. (Source: www.csoonline.com/csoresearch/report14.html)

Enterprises must ensure that the data that resides in their data warehouse and any related data marts is secure, and must restrict access to query and reporting tools. Security concerns have become more apparent with ETL processes that are now in place within many data warehousing environments.

ETL processes pull data from operational systems and access the source system using a system administrator's level ID. This is a risky approach as it often provides ETL developers with far more data than they need, potentially resulting in security concerns. By providing ETL processes with access to only required data, risks can be greatly minimized. A common alternative to extracting data from a data warehouse involves the application support team overseeing the data extract themselves and ensuring data is the correct data and is in the necessary flat file format or other formats.

Additional security concerns arise because ETL processes are usually multiple-step flows. The complexities inherent in most environments require data warehouse project teams to implement the ETL processes in multiple steps. As well as ensuring the security of the ETL process, the logic of the ETL process is also crucial. Getting the ETL logic right is one of the most challenging and technically complex aspects of a data warehouse. Small flaws in the ETL process can cause a data warehouse initiative to fail.

As data warehousing professionals, this is an issue that we must all be aware of and take proactive measures where necessary to ensure the security of valuable data assets.