Use a Secure Agent group as the runtime environment when you need to access data on-premises or when you want to access data in a cloud computing services environment without using the Hosted Agent. When you select a Secure Agent group as the runtime environment for a connection or task, a Secure Agent within the group runs the tasks.
Create Secure Agent groups to accomplish the following goals:
Prevent the activities of one department from affecting another department.
To prevent the activities of one department from impacting a different department, create separate Secure Agent groups for each department. For example, users in the sales department run 10 times as many tasks as users in the finance department, but the finance tasks are more time critical. To prevent the sales tasks from impacting the finance tasks, create separate Secure Agent groups for each department. Then assign the sales tasks to one runtime environment and the finance tasks to the other runtime environment.
Separate tasks by environment.
You can create different Secure Agent groups for test and production environments. When you configure a connection, you can associate it with the test or production database by choosing the appropriate Secure Agent group as the runtime environment.
When you create a Secure Agent group, all users in the organization can select the Secure Agent group as the runtime environment.
You can perform the following actions on a Secure Agent group:
•You can add and remove Secure Agents from a group.
•You can add multiple agents to a Secure Agent group.
Note: If you use the runtime environment to run a mapping task that is based on a mapping in advanced mode, the Secure Agent group must have only one Secure Agent.
•You can share a Secure Agent group with your sub-organizations.
If you need to access output files on the Secure Agent machine, you can view the All Jobs page in Monitor or the My Jobs page in Data Integration to determine where a task ran.