Security assessment demonstrates Cognos’ commitment to providing foundation for trusted BI and performance management.

Burlington, MA (PRWEB) August 14, 2006 -— Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced the results of a recent security evaluation on Cognos 8 Business Intelligence performed by Symantec Corporation. Cognos 8 BI helps enterprise customers worldwide continue to progress BI standardization and performance management initiatives with increased confidence in secure information delivery and access throughout the organization.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence has gone through an independent and detailed security evaluation conducted by Symantec. According to the report, the overall design of Cognos 8 BI employs a robust architecture for secure reporting and analysis. The security assessment also revealed that Cognos understands sound security practices and has surpassed industry best practices by designing a secure architecture and framework for reporting and analysis applications. The audit concluded that, at the time of the assessment, “none of the capabilities assessed contained high risk instances of common web application vulnerabilities.”
    
“As security subject matter experts, the Symantec Consulting Services organization is focused on helping companies increase their knowledge of security and other IT risks that impact them today to enable them to effectively meet the requirements of their customers,” said Charles Johnson, vice president, global consulting, Symantec. “By leveraging Symantec application security experts to assess the Cognos 8 BI security architecture, Cognos has further demonstrated its commitment to ensuring its products continue to meet customer requirements for securing their most important assets.”

Cognos 8 BI offers enterprise customers a comprehensive foundation to address BI security concerns, including the areas of authentication, access control, data-level security, application firewall, and encryption:
•     Authentication: Cognos 8 BI delivers pre-built integration with leading security providers and security APIs for custom security systems to enable simultaneous user authentication and logon to any number of namespaces, which is a key security criteria according to Symantec. Unlike other BI providers that still rely on their own security maintenance, Cognos 8 BI reduces the complexity, time, and costs of administering and maintaining multiple security systems by enabling customers to leverage “best of breed” security providers and in-place application security.
•     Access Control: Cognos 8 BI enables establishment of granular user access rights from within Cognos or a third-party security provider. This authorization is centralized to simplify administration of disperse user communities and does not burden IT administrators to manage multiple security schemes. As a result, IT can grant or deny permissions, perform BI activities, and track/audit usage for select users, groups, and roles. Customers can leverage this control to ensure government and industry compliance requirements and reduce IT costs for maintaining authorization to BI capabilities.
•     Data-level Access Rights: Cognos 8 BI enables security of all BI objects and information, from folders, subject areas, individual reports, analysis, metrics, scorecards and dashboards, events and alerts, portal pages, data connections, etc. This granular level of control eliminates the need for maintaining different information models per user group, and reduces report proliferation as one report can display different content depending on data security settings for different users. In addition, data-level security enables BI standardization of a centralized or hosted solution while ensuring different user communities only have access to the information they need.
•     Application Firewall: Cognos 8 BI’s application firewall provides additional level of web security by preventing unauthorized access to BI services. The application firewall monitors and interprets protocol traffic between BI services as a way to help prevent hostile attacks and service interruption, and logs any denied traffic. This approach balances open services with stringent security to give organizations confidence for global and external deployment.
•     Encryption: Cognos 8 BI protects all data and transmissions using industry-standard encryption algorithms such as Triple DES and AES. This encryption approach prevents vulnerability of data, temporary files, and communications, and protects information from data source to data presentation (through a dashboard, scorecard, report, spreadsheet, etc.).

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