If you’re responsible for managing SAS® platform security, and you haven’t seen them yet, then I’d definitely recommend reading Five papers on Recommended SAS 9.4 Security Model Design (part 1 & part 2) as published by David Stern, Principal Technical Architect from the SAS Global Enablement and Learning (GEL) team.
These papers are an excellent resource for SAS customers and partners to use when designing security for their SAS platform implementations. Having resources like these gives new administrators the opportunity to get it right early on and not have to learn from their own mistakes. I remember the early days of SAS 9.1 when the platform was new and best practices had yet to be discovered. At that time we were learning what practices worked and what didn’t through trial and error. Now, of course, we have the benefit of SAS documentation and published papers to learn from the prior experience of others. The first of these was the Danish Golden Rules as found in the SAS Global Forum 2011 Paper 376-2011 Best Practice Implementation of SAS Metadata Security at Customer Sites in Denmark by Cecily Hoffritz & Johannes Jørgensen. There’s also Angie Hedberg’s SAS Global Forum 2017 paper: Getting Started with Designing and Implementing a SAS 9.4 Metadata and File System Security Design. With the addition of the new GEL recommended practices, the pool of SAS security best practice information has been expanded further with a content rich guide that provides lots of detail, examples, explanations of the rules, and much more. It was also lovely to see Metacoda software get a mention in the GEL papers too. :)
I was fortunate to be able to meet with David at SAS when I was in the UK last week and we spoke about the GEL recommended practices and how the Metacoda Security Testing Framework could be used to help SAS customers and partners follow these practices.
It seemed like to a good time to provide a follow up to an older 2015 blog post I wrote on Testing Recommended Practices with SAS Metadata Security. That post was focused on the Danish Golden Rules, so in this post I’ll show our Metacoda Security Testing Framework can be used to help people follow the GEL rules. Continue reading “Following SAS GEL Security Rules with Metacoda Security Tests”
