SAS Business Intelligence Platform Overview - SAS BI

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is a set of software tools and applications that enable business users and analysts to interact with their company data in an easy, efficient, and effective manner.
SAS Business Intelligence includes

• A set of client applications designed for a specific type of business or analyst
• SAS server processes designed to provide specific types of services for the client applications
• A centralized metadata management facility.

Multiple Tier Environment

The SAS Intelligence Platform consists of a multiple tier environment that is typically represented by the

1. client tier
2. middle tier
3. server tier.

1. Client Tier:

In the most basic terms, if an application is installed on the machine that the user is sitting at, that machine is the client tier.
There are three different types of SAS client applications.

The SAS Business Intelligence (BI) client tools cannot execute SAS code on their own. They have to request code submission and other services from a SAS server.

2. Middle Tier:

The middle tier is where the Web applications reside and execute. This tier also contains the infrastructure that supports the execution of these applications, such as the

• Java Application Server or the Java Servlet Container
• SAS Web Infrastructure Kit (WIK)
• webDAV server.

WebDAV (Web-Based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote Web servers.

3. Server Tier:

The server tier is the machine where one or more SAS servers are installed and accessed by the BI tools.
There are different types of SAS servers, including:

SAS Intelligence Platform

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This is a simplified diagram of the SAS Intelligence Platform.

Clients’ Use of Foundation Servers

Business Intelligence Security

Security Concepts

In the SAS Intelligence environment, security consists of:?

• Authentication is a prerequisite for authorization.
• An authentication provider is a technology that servers or applications can use to verify that users are who they say they are.
• By default, the authentication provider for a SAS server is the host operating system of the machine on which the server is running.
• The SAS Metadata Server and SAS OLAP Server can also use alternative authentication providers. SAS Web applications run under third-party servers that can use a variety of authentication providers.

https://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/biov/63145/html/default/viewer.htm#a003069226.html