Cognos 8 BI strong on security 20 August, 2006 By Liam Lahey

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The Symantec 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, in a statement. "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."

As BI standardization and broad user adoption opens up information to more people in the enterprise, organizations may be introducing new security risks, said Harriet Fryman, senior director, product marketing for Burlington, Mass.-based Cognos.

"Our single modern architecture of Cognos 8 BI uniquely enabled us to put in place a solid foundation for security, and allows us to continue to respond to new security demands," she said. "While security is never considered 'done' or 'complete,' our software can leverage our customers' security infrastructure, perform to best practices in security implementations, and provide increased confidence for secure information access."

Cognos said it's 8 BI platform offers 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.

*Access Control: Cognos 8 BI enables establishment of granular user access rights from within Cognos or a third-party security provider. 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. 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.

*Application Firewall: Cognos 8 BI's application firewall provides additional level of web security by preventing unauthorized access to BI services.

*Encryption: Cognos 8 BI protects all data and transmissions using industry-standard encryption algorithms such as Triple DES and AES.

Frydman said the Symantec assessment results ought to inspire organizations to evaluate the technologies they bring in-house given security isn't a check-box item' but rather something that requires closer scrutiny.

"Symantec recognized Cognos understands security and we surpassed the industry's best practices with our Cognos 8 BI platform," she said. "Business intelligence is about getting more information to more people yet the more people that are given access to that information, the greater the security risk.

"The Symantec assessment should help give customers confidence to know that Cognos is committed to security and that Cognos 8 BI is one architecture and one platform that will leverage an organization's existing security infrastructure."

Organizations want to turn information into competitive advantage, but the more information they deliver, the greater the volume of security concerns. Coupled with tighter regulatory compliance and a shift to outsourcing on-demand software, companies require stringent security and a complete audit trail within and beyond the enterprise.

"BI security needs to be more than just an evaluation checklist item, and enterprises should carefully scrutinize security measures and standards to protect information while fostering access to a wide range of users," said Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel.