Security in Higher Education (Midwest, USA)
Securing Cognos Business Intelligence in Education
Background
FirstQuarter worked with the largest community college the Midwest. The college has over 10,000 students enrolled in 54 different degree programs. The college employs over 800 people in a variety of education, development and administrative roles. The college uses Cognos to report and analyze student information, as well as financial and human resource data.The confidential nature of student data and the distributed nature of the organization required a sophisticated security implementation. The college has hundreds Cognos users who require role appropriate views of information once that they receive system authentication. They needed a packaged solution and turned to FirstQuarter to provide the software necessary to rapidly facilitate their security implementation.
Business Issues
- Addressing multi-project concerns. Their Cognos implementation would grow significantly across multiple subject areas after the initial deployment phase. The business community required role appropriate views to data. Each project would require a flexible means for implementing complex security. How would they scale their deployment?
- Building vs. buying a security solution. The college realized early on that building a security solution would be costly from the perspective of driving an implementation and maintaining the application.
- Securing key business dimensions. Locking down key business dimensions (accounts, funds, and locations) within their reporting and analysis applications was the critical, final element of their data warehousing and business intelligence initiative.
- Controlled access required a single point for administration. The college 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.
Technical Issues
- Automating key processes. The college sought to automate key processes that would otherwise require hundreds of hundreds of thousands of steps to perform manually. Manual processes were highly error prone and could not be accomplished en masse.
- Single point for administration. Having a single point for security administration across the Cognos Business Intelligence Suite was critical. They sought a means for managing security across Cognos Connection, each of their business intelligence applications, and into the namespace.
- Coordinated security for reporting and multi-dimensional analysis. The college sought to have a consistent means for implementing security for Report, Query, and Analysis Studio. Setting up complex security views that were consistently implement within Framework Manager and Transformer was easily managed by ProTools.
- Streamlined process for managing memberships. ProTools also provided a streamlined means of managing memberships via its Content Manager tool. The tool streamlined the membership assignment process by 90% or more.
- Nightly batch refresh. For certain aspects of the implementation, a nightly batch refresh was required. ProTools provided this functionality via the ProTools Engine which is a "lights out" application that applies security configuration changes in batch.