MotioCAP - Cognos Security Authentication

IBM Cognos supports the implementation of Java based custom authentication providers. Custom authentication providers enable IBM Cognos to utilize customer specific sources for authentication and authorization. For example, security credentials may be stored in a proprietary database or in an external security system which is not supported by IBM Cognos out-of-the-box. 

Motio™ has implemented custom authentication providers for a large number of IBM Cognos customers around the world. Having solved this problem numerous times in a wide variety of environments, Motio created a packaged solution which enables our experts to rapidly adapt IBM Cognos environments to custom security infrastructures in a very secure and performant manner.

Top Six Reasons to utilize MotioCAP vs. Trying to build your own Custom Authentication Provider

1. Leverage Motio's expertise in IBM Cognos Authentication Providers
   • We've built hundreds of Cognos CAPs since 2004.
   • The MotioCAP is used by customers in a wide variety of industries - from academic institutions and publicly traded financial organizations to several branches of the US armed forces
2. The MotioCAP is Highly Performant, Secure & Rock Solid
   • Carefully tuned for high performance
   • Highly secure
   • Built in fault tolerance.
   • Battle tested in many large scale environments.
3. The MotioCAP is Flexible & Adaptive
   • convenient ‘flexpoints’ for supporting a wide variety of customer specific authentication scenarios.
   • You name it - we've dealt with it
   • Authentication against custom relational database schemas
   • Authentication against custom web services
   • Single Sign On (SSO)
   • Integration with SAML, CAS, ClearTrust, SiteMinder, IBM Federated Identity Management (Tivoli), etc.
   • Multi-factor authentication
   • Authentication against Peoplesoft
4. Long term support, Lower total cost of ownership
   • MotioCAP is actively supported
   • MotioCAP is actively updated and tested against the latest Cognos releases
5. Time to market
   • Days vs. Weeks.
6. Reduce Risk & Stay focused on the problem at hand
   • Building a Cognos CAP requires a very specialized skill set.
   • "Learning on the fly" can introduce instability or performance issues in your IBM Cognos environment.
   • Keep your team focused on business problems

Closing Thought for Developers:

There are a number of subtleties and potential pitfalls when developing a custom authentication provider. Some of these can leave holes in your security system, and others can cause IBM Cognos to function incorrectly or inefficiently. Most of these issues will only be discovered "the hard way". The MotioCAP framework embeds solutions to these issues so that they are taken care of automatically, and exposes convenient flexpoints for you to hook it in to your particular environment. Using the MotioCAP framework WILL dramatically reduce the time required to implement a full custom security provider (often by as much as 90%), and will ensure a robust and fully functional implementation.

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