EDW Security Considerations

An Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), according to California State University, is a collection of data that can be defined and shared across the whole enterprise along the lines of common dimensions to be used for analysis. While you are in the designing phase of an EDW, there are certain security and related functional requirements that needs to be considered.

Production Data as Test Data

In order to maintain high quality of code, a company needs to use production quality source data for development, unit test and QA functional test purposes. There could be situations when the company uses unscrambled production source data, which potentially exposes customer sensitive data. Customer sensitive data must be protected. Given that there is a correlation between the quality of test data and the quality of code delivered to production, all efforts should be made to minimize the disruption/distortion of test data, while satisfying the privacy concerns.