XML Gateway

Cloud Expo on Ulitzer Forum Systems unveiled a first-of-its-kind identity broker hardware appliance, Forum STS. Web services-based Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) enable communication via ubiquitous standards such as XML and SOAP. To foster efficient, effective message exchange and satisfy increasing user demands for real-time, aggregated information from internal and external business partners, trust must be established among all entities. Comprehensive mediation, authentication, and authorization of identity exchange among customer and partner portals, Web applications, and XML-based Web services provide the business with a simplified, coherent model for identity management and build the pillars of Federated SOA. Addressing these requirements, Forum STS produces and consumes identity tokens in varying protocol and message formats. Performing identity tran... (more)

Forum Systems Latest XML Gateway Targets SOA Federation

Looks like Forum Sentry, the pioneer and leader of XML Gateway and XML Firewall technology has announced its latest product that now addresses the growing need for handling not just XML/Web services traffic, but also HTML/Portal traffic. From a technology standpoint, this is not a revolutionary jump, but a gradual evolution of the XML Gateway that now handles HTTP/HTML-header information, which is by far easier than looking deeper into the XML packets. However, the business implication of this is significant since companies can now use a single platform for HTML and XML processi... (more)

Strategies for Securing Enterprise-to-Cloud Communication

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) published Version 2.1 of its Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing with a significant and comprehensive set of recommendations that enterprises should incorporate within their security best practices if they are to use cloud computing in a meaningful way. The Guidance provides broad recommendations for operational security concerns including application security, encryption & key management, and identity & access management. In this article, we will consider security implications of REST- and SOAP-based communication between co... (more)

Congratulations to Burton Group

Looking down my blogroll earlier today, I see "A message from Jamie Lewis". Jamie is the CEO of Burton Group, and always worth listening to, especially at his Catalyst talks. So, I click on the link and read that Burton has been acquired by Gartner! Analyst consolidation continues into 2010... Congratulations to all at Burton, especially Richard Watson who spoke at Vordel's conference last November, Anne Thomas Manes whose views on SOA are quite literally a matter of life and death, and Phil Schacter who has been tracking Vordel since 2001. ... (more)

Vint Cerf and Multi-Cloud Mayhem of Cloud Computing

If you're having trouble getting your head around a single cloud deployment, please feel free to skip this article. Now if you're someone who thinks that most IT resource will eventually live in a private or public cloud-based domain, you're not alone, and you may start looking into how best to work in a multi-cloud environment. Paul Krill's article "Cerf urges standards for cloud computing" highlights cloud interoperability and portability issues discussed by Vint Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol that forms the back bone of modern communication. It behooves us to conside... (more)