IOCO SOLUTIONS LIMITED

IBM Cognos Analytics

iOCO are an IBM partner offering Cognos Analytics on a Cloud Platform, as an AI-infused self-service of capabilities to quickly and confidently identify and act on insight. This empowers business users to create and personalise dashboards and reports on their own, while providing IT with a proven and scalable solution.

Features

• AI-infused enterprise wide reporting and analytics, with natural language interaction
• Business reporting metadata layer
• Data security built in
• Connection to major relational databases
• Connection to multidimensional (OLAP) data sources
• Proven Report Authoring Interface
• User self-service dashboards, reports, stories, exploration
• Scalable to thousands of users (Enterprise wide)
• Accessed via browser interface

Benefits

• Reports, dashboards and stories available to all levels of users
• Author reports, dashboards and stories using business terminology
• Users only see data they’re authorised to see
• Combine data from multiple sources into a single report
• Slice and dice through hierarchies to find significant insights
• Reports can be as simple or complex as needed
• Users do not need IT involvement to explore data
• Reports can be delivered regularly to users’ inboxes
• Smart data modelling understands users' intent
• Simple user interface for computer or mobile devices

£31 to £75 a user a month

• Education pricing available
• Free trial available

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at michael.morey@ioco.tech. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 14

Service ID

975145538718652

Contact

Mick Morey
0118 206 2938
michael.morey@ioco.tech

Service scope

• Software add-on or extension: Yes, but can also be used as a standalone service
• What software services is the service an extension to: Planning Analytics, IBM Cloud Pack for Data (CP4D)
• Cloud deployment model:
  • Public cloud
  • Private cloud
  • Hybrid cloud
• Service constraints: No constraints.
• System requirements:
  • Users need Internet connection
  • Users need a Web browser
  • Server needs connectivity to required data sources
  • Server needs connectivity to an authentication provider

User support

• Email or online ticketing support: Email or online ticketing
• Support response times: IOCO would define an appropriate SLA and response time for each business. Typical support response times:; Severity 1 - 1 Hour, ; Severity 2 - 4 hours, ; Severity 3 - 8 hours, ; Severity 4 - 1 Business Day or as per service catalog
• User can manage status and priority of support tickets: No
• Phone support: Yes
• Phone support availability: 9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
• Web chat support: No
• Onsite support: Yes, at extra cost
• Support levels: As a Support Providing Partner of IBM's, iOCO offers a first line support desk, backed by IBM's own Support desk, should th need arise for us to escalate a particular ticket. This is a 24/7 Service Desk providing a single point of access for all incidents and requests. The service is available via telephone or email. Responses are prioritised and addressed in line with the service levels detailed in the Service Level Agreement document.; All engagements have a named Service Manager for engagement and escalations with a Technical Service Manager who attend service review meetings.
• Support available to third parties: Yes

Onboarding and offboarding

• Getting started: Onsite or online training is available for the solution and a Getting started full set of documentation is provided with an online Help Center. iOCO would also provide project-based services to help our customers get their Cognos Analytics environments designed and built for purpose.
• Service documentation: Yes
• Documentation formats:
  • HTML
  • PDF
• End-of-contract data extraction: We are providing a platform as a service with Cognos Analytics installed and available for use. Data can be exported/imported using FTP and/or Secure Gateway. Report output may be exported in PDF, CSV, XLS or XML formats.; Dashboards and Stories can be exported in PDF.
• End-of-contract process: Typically IBM Cognos Analytics is offered as a subscription-based service which can either be -renewed or terminated. The customer has the right to backup and restore their specific Cognos Analytics content and models for future use.

Using the service

• Web browser interface: Yes
• Supported browsers:
  • Internet Explorer 11
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Firefox
  • Chrome
  • Safari
• Application to install: No
• Designed for use on mobile devices: Yes
• Differences between the mobile and desktop service: Not all authoring capabilities are available on mobile devices. Reports and dashboards may be consumed on mobile devices. Dashboards can be created on the mobile device. Active Reports (interactive dashboard-style reports) may be downloaded to a tablet for viewing even when offline with no connection to the server.
• Service interface: No
• User support accessibility: None or don’t know
• API: Yes
• What users can and can't do using the API: Cognos Analytics reporting, Administration and portal facilities are available via its Software Development Kit (SDK) from Java & .net. The SDK is designed for professional programmers, not for business users. Dashboards, Stories, Data Modules and Explorations are planned for API access in a future release.
• API documentation: Yes
• API documentation formats: PDF
• API sandbox or test environment: Yes
• Customisation available: Yes
• Description of customisation: Look and feel (colours/background) of login page, and Welcome (i.e. home) page. Shortcuts may be added to the navigation bar. All customisation requiring changes to the server are performed by IBM Cloud Operations, at extra cost.

Scaling

• Independence of resources: The iOCO Cloud and IBM Cognos Analytics platform is high availability by design with 24x7 monitoring to identify any event driven impacts on end user service whilst allowing on demand scaling of compute resources.

Analytics

• Service usage metrics: Yes
• Metrics types: Various metrics are available for this offering and toolset.
• Reporting types:
  • API access
  • Real-time dashboards
  • Regular reports

Resellers

• Supplier type: Reseller providing extra features and support
• Organisation whose services are being resold: IBM

Staff security

• Staff security clearance: Conforms to BS7858:2019
• Government security clearance: Up to Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS)

Asset protection

• Knowledge of data storage and processing locations: Yes
• Data storage and processing locations:
  • United Kingdom
  • European Economic Area (EEA)
• User control over data storage and processing locations: Yes
• Datacentre security standards: Complies with a recognised standard (for example CSA CCM version 3.0)
• Penetration testing frequency: At least once a year
• Penetration testing approach: Another external penetration testing organisation
• Protecting data at rest:
  • Physical access control, complying with CSA CCM v3.0
  • Physical access control, complying with SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
  • Physical access control, complying with another standard
  • Scale, obfuscating techniques, or data storage sharding
  • Other
• Other data at rest protection approach: The application has been built to vendor requirements, as such there is no OS or DB level encryption beyond user / password access. The application has obfuscated passwords within the databases. There are options available for encryption of data on DB and OS level, though these come with not insignificant performance hits so we would have to consider increasing resource and cost if this was needed. e.g.; PostgresSQL - CyberTec Instance Level Encryption; Centos NFS - Encrypted File System
• Data sanitisation process: Yes
• Data sanitisation type: Explicit overwriting of storage before reallocation
• Equipment disposal approach: Complying with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v.30, CAS (Sanitisation) or ISO/IEC 27001

Data importing and exporting

• Data export approach: Data can be exported/imported using FTP and/or Secure Gateway into Excel, PDF or CSV files. Report output may be exported in PDF, CSV, XLS or XML formats. Dashboards and Stories can be exported in PDF.
• Data export formats:
  • CSV
  • Other
• Other data export formats:
  • .XLS, .XLSX
  • PDF
• Data import formats:
  • CSV
  • Other
• Other data import formats:
  • .XLS
  • .XLSX
  • .TXT
  • .ZIP

Data-in-transit protection

• Data protection between buyer and supplier networks:
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • Legacy SSL and TLS (under version 1.2)
• Data protection within supplier network:
  • TLS (version 1.2 or above)
  • IPsec or TLS VPN gateway
  • Legacy SSL and TLS (under version 1.2)

Availability and resilience

• Guaranteed availability: SLA - 99.9% availability. If iOCO service fails to meet this key objective in a given calendar month, 5% of prorated monthly cloud service fee will be refunded directly to the customer account within 30 days.
• Approach to resilience: Data Centres have a high resilience setup:; • Highly secure, Tier 4 data centre environment; • Dual power circuits with UPS; • Backup power generators; • Constant environmental monitoring; • Dual network and redundant data fabric; • Software-defined storage services; • Converged and hyper-converged infrastructure; • On-going capacity planning; Application is built upon a containerised architecture. This is able to redeploy services on available hardware if it senses that an issue has occurred.
• Outage reporting: Dependent on customer requirements, outages can be accessed via Public URL, or notified by telephone and/or email alerts.

Identity and authentication

• User authentication needed: Yes
• User authentication:
  • Username or password
  • Other
• Other user authentication: SAML OATH 2.0 via Customer ADFS server
• Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels: The application is multi-tenanted. There is a back office management layer where tenants and users are setup. Application back office administrators are named and limited in number. A back office admin user does not by default have access to a tenant. By adding themselves to a tenant, this account only has very basic permissions to raise new requests and view your own requests only. The tenant admin has access to report on any action taken within their own tenant.
• Access restriction testing frequency: At least once a year
• Management access authentication: Username or password

Audit information for users

• Access to user activity audit information: Users have access to real-time audit information
• How long user audit data is stored for: User-defined
• Access to supplier activity audit information: Users contact the support team to get audit information
• How long supplier audit data is stored for: User-defined
• How long system logs are stored for: Between 1 month and 6 months

Standards and certifications

• ISO/IEC 27001 certification: No
• ISO 28000:2007 certification: No
• CSA STAR certification: No
• PCI certification: No
• Cyber essentials: Yes
• Cyber essentials plus: No
• Other security certifications: Yes
• Any other security certifications: INFORMATION SECURITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM ISO/IEC 27001:2013 for the Datacentre

Security governance

• Named board-level person responsible for service security: No
• Security governance certified: Yes
• Security governance standards: ISO/IEC 27001
• Information security policies and processes: Security is managed at three levels: Infrastructure, Environment, Customer. iOCO Cloud team are wholly responsible for Infrastructure security, governing DC / Hardware, Network and Security devices. iOCO Application Management team is responsible for managing the environment where the application is running - for example building and hardening the application to vendor recommendations. Customer is responsible for in-application security.(e.g. user role access) and the security of on-premise components that maybe required for integration purposes.

Operational security

• Configuration and change management standard: Supplier-defined controls
• Configuration and change management approach: The change management processes follow ISO27001 A.12.1.2 controlled mechanism for making changes to operational environments.
• Vulnerability management type: Supplier-defined controls
• Vulnerability management approach: We subscribe to multiple vendor provided vulnerability; notification services. All vulnerabilities are reviewed and applicable patches are administered through the change control process . Mitigation measures will always be considered first, with critical patches targeted for resolution within 30 days.
• Protective monitoring type: Supplier-defined controls
• Protective monitoring approach: Denial of Service is applied on all Internet links , with Intrusion detection\protection available to customers on request. All security events are logged\notified based on severity. Any attempted platform security compromises are dealt with 24/7 by security engineers. The responsibility remains with the customer to ensure detected intrusions are re-mediated where customershavecontrol,permission,oraccesstomodifytheir service. iOCO recommends that customers follow security best practices including, but not limited to: ; • Maintaining effective firewall rules ; • Limiting the communication ports to only the necessary, for conducting business ; • Locking down access
• Incident management type: Supplier-defined controls
• Incident management approach: The incident response process complies with industry standards for legally admissible chain-of-custody and forensic data collection management processes and controls. Response standards, procedures, and methods are implemented based on the severity level of an incident. Incident reports are produced as part of standard post incident process and provided to customers on request.

Secure development

• Approach to secure software development best practice: Supplier-defined process

Public sector networks

• Connection to public sector networks: No

Social Value

• Social Value:

  Social Value

  Fighting climate change

  Fighting climate change

  As IBM Cognos Analytics can be a hosted cloud solution and can sit either on premise, in a private or a public cloud or on the IBM Cloud as a SaaS solution, the solution can adhere to the sustainability policy of the environment on which it is hosted. These would typically be in line with either the UK Government policy in the case of on-premise or the public or private cloud providers, or IBM themselves. They will all have their own sustainability and GreenOps targets that they adhere to.

Pricing

• Price: £31 to £75 a user a month
• Discount for educational organisations: Yes
• Free trial available: Yes
• Description of free trial: Access to an IBM Cognos Analytics server (North America based) via the public internet. Reporting, Dashboarding, Stories and Data Modelling is included. System administration is excluded. The free trial is for 30-days.

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at michael.morey@ioco.tech. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.