Designing the Data Structure › Choose to Distribute or Replicate Data › Challenges of Distributed and Replicated Data › System Security

System Security

The more distributed the data is in the system, the greater the security risk.

Security considerations for distributed data:

• What authorization is required before a user can run certain procedures?

  Authorization with password may also be required before a user is able to use irreversible procedures, such as deleting data. This will probably mean holding the user identifiers and passwords centrally on the server for access by client procedures to disable options on the user interface.

• Should the system time-out after a prolonged period of inactivity?

  The enterprise's security procedures may dictate that users should not leave unattended machines logged on to systems. If so, a time-out facility may be required. However, this could lead to data integrity problems. For instance, data integrity may be impaired if the server times out but the client does not.