Major Cancer Research Center (New York, USA)

Securing Cognos Business Intelligence

Background

FirstQuarter worked with one of the most prestigious cancer centers in the world that is devoted innovative research, making significant contributions to new and better therapies for the treatment of cancer.

The organization has a significant Cognos installation with 2000+ consumers in the organization who use reporting and analytics. Their Cognos environment spans both Series 7/Cognos 8 and ten years of investment with hundreds of reports. THE ORGANIZATION also implemented security broadly within their Catalog, Transformer, and Framework Manager environments.

Security – On the Critical Path of Every Project

“In 2006 colleagues in finance found that security implementation was on the critical path and becoming a critical factor in every reporting and analysis application,” “The effort to manually implement and maintain security into Impromptu, Transformer, Framework Manager, Cognos Connection, and the associated namespace was becoming an overwhelming factor in our implementations.” At the Cognos Forum 2006, the organization learned of a software solution by Cognos Partner, FirstQuarter, Inc. called ProTools.

The Solution

    Using the combination of ProTools software and services, the organization was able to work with FirstQuarter to implement security within their environment. Below are a few of the issues that were addressed.
  • Controlled access required a single point for administration. The organization realized that controlling access to highly confidential financial data required a centralized application for security that would allow them to easily and quickly control access to both content and data.
  • Coordinated security for reporting and multi-dimensional analysis. The organization sought to have a consistent means for implementing security for Report, Query, and Analysis. Setting up complex security views that were consistently within Framework Manager and Transformer in Series 7 and Cognos 8 environments.
  • Streamlined process for managing memberships. ProTools also provided a streamlined means of managing memberships via its Content Manager tool. The tool streamlines the membership assignment process by 90% or more.
  • Implementing Security en Masse. The organization sought to automate security implementation into Impromptu, Framework Manager, Transformer, and their namespace which would otherwise require thousands of steps to perform manually.

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