Access and Authentication

After you create the data catalog, you can give users and application developers permission to shop there and find all the data they need.

Sybase Data Federation integrates with your existing directory services. If users and groups are under different administrative domains within the organization, you can integrate each local directory service that authenticates those users. A single Data Federation domain can integrate with multiple, heterogeneous directory services including LDAP-based directory services (Microsoft Active Directory, Sun ONE Directory Service) and Network Information Service (NIS) directories. Because Data Federation can integrate with multiple, heterogeneous directory services, you can associate many different users and groups with a Data Federation domain without disrupting local authentication schemes. In this way, you create a virtual pool of users and groups to whom data owners can grant access to data. And you do so without having to give remote users accounts on each local system.

Data Federation access control operates across networks, departments, and locations. For a user to have access to a specific data item, the data owner must establish the appropriate access rights for that item. The user can then browse the catalog to find the data available to him or her, and access the data as if it were local.

Consider some important implications of this unified approach:

Users no longer need direct access to multiple networks and databases to obtain data. Instead, they have a single sign-on for all data, and one place to go to get that data.
Users and applications do not need to know or specify where data is physically located to access that data; they only need to know how it is named in the data catalog.
Users can search across the entire catalog to find the data they need, regardless of how many data owners or locations are involved in provisioning data, or how many data sources are involved.
Applications have one place from which to access any data they need, and one standard set of interfaces for doing so, regardless of the specifics of the data source.
There is no disruption to local security practices. When users access the data catalog, they continue to be authenticated by their local networks, and their local administrators still have responsibility for them.
Because existing data has not moved or changed in any way, existing applications that access local data do not need to change.
Because Data Federation links to original data rather than copying it, data is always up to date, never out of sync—and storage costs are reduced.