Cognos Defines Business Intelligence Security For Enterprise-Wide Deployments

– Cognos recognized for continued growth, leadership and innovation in the manufacturing sector –

BURLINGTON, Mass., 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.).

“Organizations want to turn information into competitive advantage, but the more information they deliver, the greater the volume of security concerns,” said Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel. “In addition, tighter regulatory compliance and a shift to outsourcing on-demand software requires 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.”

“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, 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. 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.”

“One of the benefits we have identified with Cognos 8 BI is the ability to integrate the BI security with our existing enterprise security architecture,” said Mark Lack, planning and financial analysis manager, Mueller, Inc. “This ease of integration is important for three reasons. First, because user access is defined at the enterprise level, users only see BI data they already have access to, making their experience easy and seamless. Second, this alleviates the frustration and nightmare of maintaining security at multiple levels. Third, by keeping security in sync across our applications, we can help reduce our cost and risk.”

“BI security risks can occur at any point during information access, from the end user down to specific data points,” said Frank Gelbert, CEO, Appfluent Technology, a Cognos technology partner. “Cognos 8 BI’s inherent security capabilities protect enterprises down to the data layer. Our joint customers benefit from this deep level of protection, and when combined with the Appfluent data usage solutions, gain visibility into how data and applications are being accessed. As a result, enterprises can monitor usage and improve efficiency of BI and performance management solutions with greater confidence.”

For more information about Cognos 8 BI security, visit http://www.cognos.com/products/framework_services/
index.html#security

About Cognos:
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.

Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organization’s ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? – and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies.

Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.
Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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Amy Shanler

Senior Manager, Public Relations

Cognos

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