Areas of Focused Expertise

Blade Virtualization

Cognosit creates single or multiple chassis packed with blade servers which runs virtualization software to allow multiple “virtual” servers. Rather than dealing with individual servers with specific hardware configurations you deal with a pool of hardware resources which can be assigned to virtual servers at will. You may adjust or create servers dynamically based on real business needs without concern for specific server resources.

Clustering

As opposed to load balancing, clustering allows for resource groups to fail over automatically between servers when a problem is detected. For example, a resource group composed of a SQL server instance, the NIC IP address associated with that instance, and the volume holding the data and log files. Should this resource group fail in any way on its host server, the entire resource group will automatically fail over to another designated member of the cluster.

Clustering is one of the most powerful enterprise class technologies that can be applied to provide a 99.9% uptime environment. Cognosit has a great deal of specific expertise in this area.

Content Service Switches/Application Accelerators

In order to optimize Web response time and availability, Cognosit configures CSS and application acceleration devices to provide global load balancing of content between peering switches as well as application layer control. The ability to operate on OSI Layer 7 allows for dramatically more sophisticated control and redirect capabilities. Some examples include: routing users geographically to the closest data center and serving them content specific to their region, rewriting URL’s to flatten https requests to port 80, watching for specific content variables on web pages and taking action based on embedded values, as well as muxing and demuxing of IP sessions in order to dramatically reduce the number of discrete sessions hitting the server farm.

Cyber Security Barriers

A common security analogy is “a security system is no stronger than its weakest link.” Cryptographic techniques defend data in transit between systems, reducing the probability that data exchanged between systems can be intercepted or modified. This includes user authentication, mandatory access control, encryption, anti-virus software and malware protection as well as system firewalls.

Database Server Farms

As databases become larger and lager server farms are increasingly being used instead of a mainframe computers in large enterprises and web businesses. Given the sheer number of computers in large server farms, the failure of individual machines is routine. Managing the server farms means providing support for redundancy, automatic failover, and rapid reconfiguration of the database server cluster. Cognosit has the experience and expertise to keep your database server farms online, all the time.

Disaster Recovery

Never is the need for disaster recovery plan more apparent than when you’ve had an “incident.” Cognosit can assist you in putting together a cohesive plan that ensures minimal business disruption and the quickest return to business continuity.

Encryption TPM

The management and recovery of Trusted Computer Platforms carries a risk of serious data loss in the event that a TPM security chip or hard drive is corrupted or if a user leaves the organization. Security, data integrity and enterprise-level processes must be maintained while ensuring proper archive procedures and recovery by someone other than the original user.

Fraud Detection and Control

Fraud is increasingly an expensive problem for organizations across the globe. Cognosit works with your organization to coordinate investigative initiatives to a centralized fraud repository. That data is analyzed to identify key patterns that can be integrated into transactional systems. Lastly your organization will be able to incorporate best practices to minimize fraud related risk, satisfy Sarbox regulatory requirements, minimize fraud related losses and maximize recovery.

Geographic Dispersion

Geographic Dispersion describes the physical dispersion of multiple internet servers within a country, region or hemisphere. There are performance benefits from having multiple points-of-presence, redundant transmission paths, and multiple international access points.

Cloud Instance Virtualization

Move from fixed servers to cloud instances to benefit from elastic resources and on-demand scalability. You can run any operating system with any service you choose for production or fire up on demand load testing, QA labs or development environments. You can also use complete black box cloud services for security, databases, email and monitoring etc. Cloud is the future of the data center.

Holistic Monitoring

A real-time holistic view of enterprise security observes all significant substation parameters continuously and raises an alarm well in advance of any attack or catastrophic failure. These attacks may be targeted on inconspicuous assets or they maybe blended threats. If security breaches are unmanaged they can cause different kinds of damage to an organization in terms of revenue, reputation and business opportunities loss. The Cognosit methodology reveals potential attacks on or within the organization and plugs them.

Intrusion Detection Systems

An intrusion detection system scans for unauthorized users or unwanted manipulations and usage of computer systems as well as suspicious and malicious network traffic that can’t be detected by a conventional firewall. This includes network attacks against vulnerable services, data driven attacks on applications, host based attacks such as privilege escalation, unauthorized logins and access to sensitive files, as well as viruses, trojan horses, worms and other malware.

Multimedia Streaming and Encoding

The video an end user sees as an online video stream is the result of migrating the video you shoot into a computer ready digital format. Encoding is the process of preparing media files and how you convert them has a direct a impact on the quality of your user’s experience online.

Cognosit uses select software, hardware and other streaming media conversion tools to migrate your media from one medium to another including: Beta Tape, VHS, DVD, CD, WMA, AVI, MOV and many more.

Cognosit leverages technology from Microsoft, Real, Pinnacle Systems and Apple to reliably stream the finished video out to clients on the internet.

Network Design

Cognosit approaches network design as an iterative process, it encompasses topological design, network-synthesis, and network-realization, to ensure that a network or service meets the needs of the subscriber and operator.

Penetration Testing

A penetration test evaluates the security of computer systems and networks by simulating a hacker attack. The Cognosit process involves an active analysis of the system for any weaknesses, technical flaws or vulnerabilities. Taking the position of a potential intruder penetration testing will actively exploit security vulnerabilities. Any security issues that are found are presented to along with an impact assessment and proposal to mitigate the situation.

Security Audit Certifications

Cognosit performs on-site security audit and assessment services for organizations that accept credit cards, including VISA, for e-commerce transactions. Your company must be in full compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard. Failure to comply can mean revocation of VISA privileges and/or up to $500,000 in fines, per incident.

Singe Sign-On (SSO)

Providing a single authentication across multiple systems, companies and locations through the use of such technology as ADFS and Shibboleth using SAML, WS-Fed and LDAP.

Site Analytics

Measuring the behavior of visitors to your website clarifies how well your e-commerce and online marketing tactics are tracking against strategic goals. Cognosit can clearly illustrate which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase, as well as where shoppers leave your site and map that against hundreds of other variables. Site analytics provide the answers to making your web initiative more productive and profitable.

SSL Offloaders

Secure Socket Layer (SSL), the industry standard protocol, maintains the confidentiality of transactions but extracts a high performance cost for Web sites. This results in the lost customers, lost productivity, and lost sales. Instead of adding costly HTTPS servers to handle SSL bottlenecks, Cognosit implements an SSL offloader strategy that optimizes appliances and seamlessly handles all SSL transactions; resulting in significant boost in performance at a fraction of the cost of HTTPS servers

Storage Area Networks (SAN)

A storage area network allows for the pooling of storage across multiple servers and workstations. This permits an organization to dynamically assign storage capacity where needed. It also allows for the cost effective use of power management, redundancy and backup technology at a single point of failure, rather than discrete storage capacity spread throughout the organization.

Data Protection is essential to every company and Cognosit specializes in designing and implementing Storage Area Networks to manage file backup and archival storage at the head office as well as remote locations using wide area network carrier technologies.

The experience of Cognosit with SANs extends to support disk mirroring, backup and restore, archival and retrieval of archived data, data migration from one storage device to another, and the sharing of data among different servers in a network.

Transaction Servers

Cognosit plans and implements Transaction Servers to simplify the management of user initiated application and database transaction requests, ensure security, create connections to other servers, cache transactional information and maintain transaction integrity for database.

Web Server Farms

A web server farm is typically a group of servers acting together using some load balancing mechanism to distribute a single or multiple websites. The key element of a web server farm is the load balancing mechanism. Typical load balancing approaches include: DNS, OSPF, content service switches or NLB/WLBS. There are many complex variables associated with a webserver farm configuration including; geographic dispersion, affinity and failover expiry. Cognosit can help you simplify the complexity of web server farms.