A data
warehouse is a gathering of information from a business and data derived from
operational systems and external data sources. A data warehouse is implemented
to support business decisions by conducting consolidation analysis of data and
reporting at different levels. Data is populated into the data warehouse
through the processes of extraction, transformation and loading (ETL).
Data ethics
is relevant to data warehousing it is important to make customers feel safe and
that data safe and it won’t be exploited, for example customers don’t like
giving there details away because many organisations use customers data without
knowledge and merge customer data with secondary sources giving away their
information. However doing this does have some benefits as can help a business
better understand the customers’ needs and can give customers benefits such as
giving them better deals which increases customer satisfaction.
Security
in a data warehouse is vital to ensure that data remains clean, consistent and
that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. There are many ways to enforce
security one way is at a data level. To enforce security at a data level is to implement user access
control this is where data may be classified by its sensitivity for example
highly sensitive details such as payroll details may need to classified as
highly restricted. There are different ways users can be classified a top down
approach can be taken where administrators can select user access levels for
other employees with the business for example a normal employee will not need
the same levels access as an administrator. There are different levels such as
read data and write data this stops lower class employees being able to view
sensitive data.
To
enforce data at a client level is to for users to use strong passwords that are
strong enough and difficult to crack for example use a mixture of characters,
symbols and numbers this makes it harder for hackers to crack. Other procedures
can be put in place too for example make users change their password every few
months this increases security. Firewall and antivirus software are also
critical to ensure that the network is properly protected from outside hackers.
Firewall protects the network by controlling internet traffic coming in and out
of the servers. Data encryption is also important
when data is sent to the database it is encrypted when users that are allowed
to access the data it decrypts it and it can be read by the user.
