Administrative Controls
Access will be restricted to a need-to-know basis. As we have noted, changes to the systems are monitored and audited. At the application level, files and directories will be given permissions such that only the applications that need to read particular files or data are given permission to read those files. This is all in accordance with the way that proper administrative and operating system permissions should be set up. The business analytics systems and tools don’t require superuser rights for reading and executing everything on the system. Therefore, the processing unit has rights to its configuration files and data gathering module files. The reporting module reads its own configuration files. None of these can write into the configuration data. Only Management Console is given permission to write data into the configuration files. In this way, even if any of the three processing modules is compromised, the compromised component cannot make use of configuration files to compromise any of the other modules in the system. This is how self-defensive software should operate. Business analytics adheres to these basic security principles, thus allowing the system to be deployed in less trusted environments, even less protected than what Digital Diskus provides.
