Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services

Chapter 14. Report Server Administration

To ensure the integrity and reliability of your Reporting Services environment, it is important that you develop a comprehensive administrative plan for it. This plan should address the following general concerns:

• Security

• Backup and recovery

• Monitoring

• Configuration

In this chapter, you will explore these topics as they relate to Reporting Services. This will provide you the basic knowledge you will need to then engage users, developers, and IT administrators in the development of a plan tailored to the specific needs of your organization.

Security

Properly securing your Reporting Services environment requires you to find the right balance between risk, availability, and supportability. Following good network, system, and facilities management practices goes a long way toward securing your installation. Specific to Reporting Services, you should consider how to best approach:

• Account management

• System-level roles

• Surface area management

Account Management

Reporting Services must interact with various resources. To access these resources, Reporting Services must present its requests as originating from a specific, valid user. Reporting Services stores credentials, typically username and password combinations, for the following three accounts, each of which is used to handle specific interactions with resources:

• The service account

• The application database account

• The unattended execution account

Whenever possible, it is recommended that you make use of Windows ...