A datawarehouse is a gathering of information from a business and data derived fromoperational systems and external data sources. A data warehouse is implementedto support business decisions by conducting consolidation analysis of data andreporting at different levels.
Data is populated into the data warehousethrough the processes of extraction, transformation and loading (ETL). Data ethicsis relevant to data warehousing it is important to make customers feel safe andthat data safe and it won’t be exploited, for example customers don’t likegiving there details away because many organisations use customers data withoutknowledge and merge customer data with secondary sources giving away theirinformation. However doing this does have some benefits as can help a businessbetter understand the customers’ needs and can give customers benefits such asgiving them better deals which increases customer satisfaction.Securityin a data warehouse is vital to ensure that data remains clean, consistent andthat it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
There are many ways to enforcesecurity one way is at a data level. To enforce security at a data level is to implement user accesscontrol this is where data may be classified by its sensitivity for examplehighly sensitive details such as payroll details may need to classified ashighly restricted. There are different ways users can be classified a top downapproach can be taken where administrators can select user access levels forother employees with the business for example a normal employee will not needthe same levels access as an administrator. There are different levels such asread data and write data this stops lower class employees being able to viewsensitive data. Toenforce data at a client level is to for users to use strong passwords that arestrong enough and difficult to crack for example use a mixture of characters,symbols and numbers this makes it harder for hackers to crack.
Other procedurescan be put in place too for example make users change their password every fewmonths this increases security. Firewall and antivirus software are alsocritical to ensure that the network is properly protected from outside hackers.Firewall protects the network by controlling internet traffic coming in and outof the servers. Data encryption is also importantwhen data is sent to the database it is encrypted when users that are allowedto access the data it decrypts it and it can be read by the user.