photo credit: 2Tales

Cognos security in its simplest form is very straight-forward:  You either can access the Cognos environment or you cannot.  Typically most Cognos clients I know shy away from highly complex hierarchical security implementations within their organizations, where managers, regions, departments and/or VPs all have specialized access rights to reports, filtered data or even column-level control.  Security is usually broken down into a very small number of groups (if even that much) and reports are usually on a “see-it-or-not” approach.

The reason that most Cognos security implementations are kept so simple, I believe, is that managing a highly complex Cognos security implemenation is a real chore.  The more granular and complex the security, the more burdensome the task.  Furthermore, this is not a one-time setup task, but an administrative requirement to maintain for the life of the Cognos environment, as users move around the organization.

But there is a product that can help.

I recently attended a demo of Security Studio by First Quarter.  The product allows you to define security easily throughout your Cognos 7 and Cognos 8 environments.  You define your users, groups, roles and rights with a simple interface, and then Security Studio updates these security settings in the Cognos environments.  I could easily see how this would be a huge time-saver for a complex hierarchical security implementation.  It’s certainly worthy of consideration if you are mantaining or considering a complex Cognos security environment.