What’s Hot with Web Services?

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Securing & Managing XML & Web Services in the Enterprise

There are two related forces that are transforming information technology today: the rapid growth of XML traffic on the network, and the widespread adoption of Web Services as a way of reducing the cost of integration and moving traditional enterprise architectures to flexible, Service-oriented architectures. Enterprises must plan ahead if they want to be able to manage the XML and Web Services on their networks. Even more importantly, enterprises must take care to provide uninterrupted security for their IT environments. In the face of these changes, XML and Web Services introduce new security concerns for the IT manager, and new technology tools, including XML firewalls, offer the missing pieces of security that today’s enterprises need.

XML Proxies

As the use and proliferation of XML and Web Services spreads throughout the corporate IT environment, so too will the demands on optimizing the performance of the XML data and applying enterprise-wide XML policies. Increasingly organizations are seeking to find solutions that can transparently monitor XML traffic on the network and apply business rules or corporate IT policies such as security, routing, performance, management, transformation, or end-point connection provisioning. Enterprises will implement XML Proxies, which can be either hardware Network Appliances,software Proxies, or software Firewalls, as a transparent layer over current LAN and WAN traffic, monitoring and acting on XML data as dictated by pre-configured rules.

XML Proxies

As the use and proliferation of XML and Web Services spreads throughout the corporate IT environment, so too will the demands on optimizing the performance of the XML data and applying enterprise-wide XML policies. Increasingly organizations are seeking to find solutions that can transparently monitor XML traffic on the network and apply business rules or corporate IT policies such as security, routing, performance, management, transformation, or end-point connection provisioning. Enterprises will implement XML Proxies, which can be either hardware Network Appliances,software Proxies, or software Firewalls, as a transparent layer over current LAN and WAN traffic, monitoring and acting on XML data as dictated by pre-configured rules.

Service-Oriented Management

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.

ZapNote: Flamenco Networks

While a lot of effort and emphasis has been placed on the development of Web Services standards and specifications, there are a number of cross-platform and cross-organization implementation issues associated with actually putting Web Services technologies to use. Flamenco Networks has unveiled a three-layered approach to Web Services connection provisioning, optimized SOAP communications, and value-added network services. The system provides a means to automate Web Service roll out, synchronize infrastructure configuration, and provide value-added services in the form of third-party non-repudiation, service level agreements, secure and reliable delivery, and ongoing management of the Web Services network.