Analysis Authorizations refer to the new authorization concept by which data access is controlled. The philosophy behid Analysis Authorizations being that users are looking at SAP BI for data analysis and their authorizations should also be according to the data that they want and not by the objects that they access / want to access.
Authorization in BI system allows a user to perform certain activity or grants permission to certain data. Authorizations are based on authorization objects, by maintaining the values in the authorization objects we can grant or restrict access to BI users. Various authorization objects are delivered by SAP, such as S_RS_ADMWB, S_RS_IOBJ, S_RS_DS, etc to name a few. Users are assigned with Roles and Profiles which drive the authorizations in BI system. Depending on the kind of activity performed by the user, authorization concept is divided into Standard Authorizations and Analysis Authorizations in BI 7.0.
Standard authorization refers to concept where in the users are provided with access to the functionalities of Data Warehousing Workbench, such as modeling, monitoring, extraction, loading, data mining, etc. The concept where reporting of data using the authorization relevant characteristics is done, is called as Analysis Authorizations. In BW 3.x, there was no division in authorizations for Data Warehousing Workbench and Reporting. Reporting authorizations was part of standard authorizations. But with BI 7.0 this new concept came into existence which enables us to protect critical data in a much better way.
After a technical upgrade SAP provides us with an option of either using the new Analysis Authorizations concept or still continue with the old concept. In order to have more flexibility and to take advantage of the new authorizations concept, SAP recommends Analysis Authorizations.
Transaction code for creating and maintaining the Analysis Authorizations is RSECADMIN. Analysis authorizations, do not use authorization objects like BW 3.x, instead they are based on groups of Characteristics or Navigational attributes or both. We restrict the values of the characteristics in order to provide access. We have the flexibility to have characteristic restrictions based on a exit variable.
There is a facility to migrate the old Reporting Authorizations from BW 3.x to new concept of Analysis Authorization in BI 7.0. Using the program RSEC_MIGRATION, will take us through a step-by-step process for migrating the authorizations.