Three things to note for SAS admins: May 2018

[ShelleySessoms]

SAS admins are a busy and curious group, and that is absolutely evident in this admin community. We have folks asking for intro-level help, as well as for information needed by an advanced admin. We have folks asking questions and sharing best practices. It is my absolute pleasure to help ALL of you get the information you need to do your jobs well.

To that end, here are just three of my “don’t miss” items from May:

• SUGA held a webinar on May 23 where Mark Schneider covered the administration presentations during SAS Global Forum 2018. You can view the webinar and see the slides (complete with links to the presentations).

• SAS employee Rob Collum posted a great article on contemplating I/O for SAS. He notes, “There is no one-size-fits-all approach to provisioning disk storage for SAS technologies. We must take care to proactively identify the areas where data transfer will play a key role in the perceived performance of our SAS solutions.”

• A community member needed help figuring out why the JSON files was not being updated in his backup config. @JuanS_OCS took on the challenge, found the solution and learned something along the way.

 See anything interesting this month that I missed? Hit reply and share!

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Did you miss the other installments in my series? No worries. You’ll find them under the tag: admin three things.

[MichelleHomes]

On May 25th GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) which is also known as DSGVO (Datenschutz-Grundverordnung), and probably other acronyms, came into effect. While SAS administrators may not need to adhere to the regulation in their day-to-day role, they would certainly need to be aware of it, like other regulations, to support their business users and protect the data SAS platforms access and use.

As Joyce Norris-Montanari shared in her data security and privacy - part 1 blog, some questions to consider regarding data privacy are:

• What procedures and guidelines do we use today to safeguard data?
• Where is our personal data stored?
  • Identification and documentation of where the data lives will always be required.
• Can we assess, document and understand the interfaces or data flows between data stores? This is important so you can understand what application or system created the data, as well as what applications or systems update or delete the data.
  • I encourage use of an enterprise data model (if you have one), as well as application system data models to help you understand the data.
• What is the data quality, based on profiling or sampling the data stores?

SAS administrators may want to look at other SAS GDPR related blog posts at https://blogs.sas.com/content/tag/gdpr/ as well as tenants and insights from a survey SAS conducted in the GDPR compliance in a data-driven world e-book.

Kind Regards,

Michelle