Metacoda Security Plug-ins: Benefits

We believe there are 3 main benefits you will gain from using Metacoda Security Plug-ins:

1. Improves Productivity: helping you get things done faster and do things which might otherwise be too difficult or time consuming.
2. Encourages Good Practices: helping you spot potential issues early on and work towards resolving them.
3. Promotes Documentation & Audit: helping you easily document and regularly review your SAS® metadata security implementation.

Read on for more details …

Improves Productivity

Metacoda Security Plug-ins will enhance your productivity as a SAS platform administrator. With enhanced visibility of your SAS metadata security implementations, in whole-of-server views, you will be able to find what you need much faster than using manual pen-and-paper methods.

For example, consider how long it currently takes you to:

Find troublesome Access Control Entries (ACEs)?

Our ACE Reviewer, ACE Protection and ACE Participation tabs allow you to quickly review ACE usage.

Find out which folders and objects have an Access Control Templates (ACT) applied to them?

Our ACT Reviewer, ACT Protection and ACT Participation tabs allow you to quickly review ACT usage.

Find out all of the groups a user is a member of, both through direct membership as well as indirect nested membership?

Our User Reviewer Groups tab provides this identity hierarchy information:

… it also detects any groups with circular references and marks them with a special icon.

Find out all of the roles a user is a member of, regardless of the level of nesting of groups and roles?

Our User Reviewer Roles tab provides this information:

Find out all of the capabilities a user has been granted, and all of the paths by which they have acquired them, regardless of the level of nesting of groups and roles?

Our User Reviewer Capabilities tab provides this information:

Find out which logins a user has access to, including any shared logins from direct group membership as well as indirect nested group membership?

Our User Reviewer Logins tab provides this information:

Encourages Good Practices

Metacoda Security Plug-ins provides recommended practice indicators that highlight potential issues for further investigation. In the screenshot below, a warning icon is used to indicate a potential issue with an Access Control Template (ACT) and its protection status. The tooltip message explains that the ACT has not been explicitly protected and that explicitly securing ACTs with an ACT is a recommended practice.

Promotes Documentation & Audit

You know it is important to review your SAS metadata security implementation on a regular basis and keep the documentation up to date. It can be a very time-intensive and error-prone exercise to manually review and document. You can imagine this means it doesn’t get done as often as it should.

Metacoda Security Plug-ins helps by allowing you to export all of the SAS metadata security information presented, either individually or as a whole, into HTML reports. The HTML reports can be published in an intranet for viewing in a web browser, emailed to the relevant people, or included into a Microsoft Word document for example.

This makes it possible to regularly update the documentation for your SAS metadata security implementation, or provide a report to auditors.

After you have worked hard to implement a SAS metadata security plan, use Metacoda Security Plug-ins to export HTML reports as a snapshot of your work. You can refer back to it later on to see what has changed.