Features

How Secure is Cloud Computing?

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:15:00 EST

Diffie makes a good point: taken as a whole, the benefits of commodity air travel are so high that it allows us to ignore the not insignificant negatives (I gripe as much as anyone when I travel, but this doesn’t stop me from using the service). In the long term, will the convenience of cloud simply overwhelm the security issues? The history of computing, of course, is a history full of such compromise. Right now we are in the early days of cloud computing, where all of us in the security community are sniping at the shortcomings of the technology, the process, the legal and regulatory issues, and anything else that appears suspect. But truthfully, this is the ultimate low hanging fruit. Identifying problems with the cloud is effortless; offering real solutions is considerably harder.

Database as a Service: A Different Way to Manage Data

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

DaaS is the latest entrant into the “as a Service” realm and typically provides tools for defining logical data structures, data services like APIs and web service interfaces, customizable user interfaces, and data storage, backup, recovery and export policies. To ensure successful DaaS implementations, developers and database professionals need to address traditional challenges associated with data design and performance tuning. They will also need to address new challenges introduced by the lack of physical access for backup, recovery and integration.

Google Responds to the Bing Challenge

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

"At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on Google sites all over the world," notes a Google spokesman in a recent statement on The Google Official Blog. "Right now, we are running a small experiment of a new Google homepage design that shows links when a user mouses over the screen. This is just a test and a way for us see whether our users will celebrate an even simpler search interface."

Achieve Better, Faster & Cheaper Through Holistic Data Center Architecture

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:00:00 EST

The three perpetual business demands of better, faster and cheaper may just be three of the best reasons to consider infrastructure virtualization. Today’s virtualization technologies, properly architected and deployed, can provide significant benefit to organizations working to evolve their IT infrastructure from an inflexible collection of individual assets into a system capable of rapidly adapting to meet business demands.

Showcasing the Key Design Principles of SOA

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:30:00 EST

WS-BPEL 2.0 is the dominant specification to standardize orchestration logic and process automation between Web services. The BPEL model is used to assemble a set of discrete, essentially disparate, services into an end-to-end process flow to transform the existing stateless and uncorrelated Web service infrastructure into cohesive, process-centric applications based on a service-oriented architecture. Under this model, new applications are developed “on-the-fly” by wiring together external “partner” services that leverage existing enterprise assets.

Down-to-Earth Contracts that Keep the Cloud Aloft

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:45:00 EST

This article looks at the basic interoperability requirements when communicating with the Cloud, and in particular at techniques and standards used to express and enforce wire-level contracts between communicating parties, as these parties are increasingly also contracting parties in a Cloud environment. Many standards already developed for Web services and service-oriented architectures provide to the communicating parties a good understanding and control of the expected quality of service at the most basic level of the interaction.

Cross-Platform Data Migration

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST

This article provides a step-by-step approach to cloning the DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB) across platforms and describes the usage of DB2 utilities that help to accomplish the task. There is no direct support in DB2 UDB for cross-platform backup and restore operations. It means one cannot simply take a backup of your DB2 UDB running on the Windows operating system and restore it to DB2 UDB running on the Linux operating system.

The Triumph of the Ho-Hum SOA

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

If you’ve followed the arc of the SOA revolution, you might have expected the current moment to be one of great fanfare and proclamations of success. SOA (was supposed to have) arrived! SOA (was supposed to be) an accepted standard for software development and enterprise architecture. Yet, as we have seen, the naysayers appear to have had their day. SOA is DOA, we are told again and again.

Performance Considerations in Distributed Applications

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

Distribution and communication between applications and services is a central concept in modern application architectures. In order to profit from distribution you have to keep some basic principles in mind – otherwise you can easily run into performance and scalability problems. During development these problems often do not surface. Then suddenly in load testing or production you might then realize that your chosen software architecture does not support the required performance and scalability requirements. In this post we will look at major points to keep in mind when building distributed applications.

Make the Most of Cloud Computing with SOA

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EDT

While there are many attempts to fix the badly broken IT architectures within our enterprises, most ‘solutions’ just put another technology layer on top of the existing technologies in hopes that the technology will somehow fix the issues. As you may have guessed, it just makes things more complex. Few enterprises were willing to take the risk and address the core issues.

Why SOA Needs Cloud Computing - Part 1

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:30:00 EDT

It’s Thursday morning, you’re the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, and you just called your executives into the conference room for the exciting news. The board of directors has approved the acquisition of a key competitor, and you’re looking for a call-to-action to get everyone planning for the next steps.

New Eco-Aware Data Center in Mauritius

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:45:00 EDT

Mauritius may soon emerge as the next ecologically aware data center of choice for companies from the United States to Australia, due to its progressive approach to technological investment and overall national stability. Using an innovative Sea Water Air Conditioning (SWAC) system pumping cool jets of ocean water from nearly 2000 meters down, this Indian Ocean island nation offers appealing corporate taxation and investment opportunities and boasts geo-political stability making it an attractive option for disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

Implementing RESTful Services

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EDT

The RESTful architectural style [1], with its URL addressable, resource oriented approach allows you to define Web services which can have multiple runtime representation in a variety of different media types. You define a Web resource, encapsulating the desired functionality within a business method, accessible via a URI over the HTTP protocol and its different “verbs”: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE [2]. The transferred content may be either HTML, XML, binary data or images, which, depending on the business use case often require to be embedded within the same message.

Game-Changing Innovations and the Evolving SOA Appliance

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:30:00 EDT

"Virtualizing hardware appliances is pretty tough, it's pretty much impossible," says Intel’s Blake Dournaee in this informative and forward-looking webinar currently screening on SYS-CON.TV. Co-presenting with Oracle’s Vikas Jain, the webinar discusses three game-changing innovations. So if you want to learn about new B2B security threats like "XML bombs" - and about what's different about Cloud Computing when it comes to service mediation - make sure to view this video today.

Get Greater Business Insights and Relieve IT Cost Pressure?

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:00:00 EDT

With heightened pressure on today’s businesses from the current global economic woes, figuring out what to do next on many business and technology decision-making levels, and making sure they are the right moves, can make or break your business. Take a moment to consider the following questions.

Corporate Management: Complexity Is Risk

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:00:00 EDT

Have you noticed how people that are neck deep in complexity almost always ask for a standardized solution? And they supposedly do this to regain oversight.

And in reverse; have you noticed how people that have everything neatly packed in small modular boxes almost always ask for some highly customized guerilla tactic – which inherently adds complexity?

Well, no matter how you answer both of these questions, you might know that they are really part of another phenomenon, namely they are about risk.

The Cloud Bubble: Is Computing Becoming a Utility?

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:15:00 EDT

The Gartner Hype cycle research shows Cloud Computing as being on the peak of expectations… the very top of the hype bubble roller coaster. Vendors are looking for something to sell, and the consolidation of the data center, reducing operational cost and economy of scale are as convenient of an excuse as anything. There are some fundamental technologies as well that will make a big difference such as Virtualization.

The Case for Single-Purpose Services

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

Justifying the extra investment for developing a single-purpose service – a service expected to solve only one large business problem - instead of putting the single-purpose logic inside a non-service-oriented application can be challenging. Reuse, the most popular motivation for creating services, will not apply. So where's the business case? Acceptable justifications can include: enabling support for multiple providers, isolating logic from change, centralizing IT-support for a given business process, service composition optimization, and separation of concerns. Although performance is commonly referenced as a reason to not create services, that line of thought is not always valid. With the help of patterns referenced from the recently published SOA Design Patterns book [REF-1] and the soapatterns.org site [REF-17], this article will delve into these issues as we explore the case for the single-purpose service.

The Benefits of Virtualization in a Cloud

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:15:00 EDT

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) that have previously considered virtualization in the cloud but decided that it is too expensive or simply not viable should think again. Virtualization and cloud computing enables SMBs to green their operations and build IT infrastructures that are agile, resilient and highly scalable.

Eight Gates to Great SOA Governance

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:00:00 EDT

While there’s certainly no shortage of opinions on the future of SOA, the reality is that SOA is very much alive. The core principles of what SOA can do in terms of cost savings, increased productivity, and the virtual elimination of information and application silos won’t go away. However, the term “SOA” will likely evolve into something else, as it becomes more and more a part of the computing landscape.

ESB Pattern: What Is the ESB?

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EDT

ESB products emerged around 2002 from message-oriented middleware (MOM). Faced with market domination by IBM, MOM vendors were the first to jumpstart the ESB concept with the aim of developing a unique selling proposition. They added Web service and EAI capabilities on top of existing message broker capabilities, and with analyst support coined the term ESB. ESB was positioned as a low-cost alternative to EAI and panacea for all integration needs – tell-tale signs of hype.

High-Performance Data Services with Smart Caching

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:30:00 EDT

One of the main concerns among IT architects planning an implementation of an enterprise data virtualization layer in their service-oriented architecture (SOA) or overall information system is the performance of the participating data services. Performance becomes particularly important in real- or near-real-time environments as well as in environments with highly distributed data sources where network latency cannot be controlled.

Transition a C-Level SOA Skeptic into a SOA Backer

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:00:00 EDT

SOA C-level skeptics come in all shapes and sizes. They can be in any industry or any government agency. They can be close friends who “really like you” and no matter what, will invite you to their backyard barbeques. However, despite their differences or that fact that they may be you friends – C-level executives must have confidence the enterprise architect can deliver on what he proposes.

ITIL Means Business for IT

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:30:00 EDT

The "reset economy" has moved the business and operations maturity process of IT from "nice to have" to "must have," if costs are going to be cut without undermining operational integrity.

What Is Service Orientation?

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:30:00 EDT

Businesses tend to focus their architecture on efficiency instead of agility. This clear distinction between optimising for the known versus optimising for the unknown inherently counteracts on businesses in their effort to seize any of the new opportunities that arises around them. This article emphasises the importance of architecting enterprise wide systems with quality capabilities and a service orientation that more properly reflects business agility and enables new opportunities to create much more focused, efficient, and adaptable organisational structures.

Why Current Network Protocol-Based Firewalls and Routers Can't Handle XML

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Look in the network closet in any good-sized company today and you’ll find a wide assortment of network gear: firewalls, switches, gateways, routers, hubs, bridges, the list goes on and on. Each of these devices essentially either directs or secures the packets that form the automobiles on the streets and freeways of today’s networks. All data networks -- including the mother of all data networks, the Internet -- are built from these packet-directing and packet-securing devices. All this equipment works pretty well, as long as they don’t care what is actually inside the packets. And there’s the rub. The amount of traffic going over the network that is XML formatted -- in particular, Web Services messages -- is set to explode, and all that equipment in the closet is completely unprepared to direct or secure that XML traffic.

Cloud Computing & SOA: Getting the Links Straight Between Them

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Want to know what gets my blood pressure up? It’s when there’s both a huge shift in thinking around how we should do computing, namely cloud computing, and at the same time, there’s a bunch of information out there that causes confusion. As cloud computing hype spikes to a frenzy, so does the number of less-than-intelligent things that I hear about it and its relationship to SOA.

Model First, Service-Enable Next

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:45:00 EDT

Reducing the cost of IT management is one of the primary pressures for most organizations. One of the most common ways to reduce such costs is to enable the reuse of applications that developers have already created and configured for the enterprise. In the past decade, especially in the past 3-5 years, companies have spent millions of dollars on enterprise software applications of all sorts: CRM, ERP, and other operational applications. The next few years will be less about new application development, and more about existing application integration and reuse.

Making Cloud a Reality for Enterprises via SOA Governance

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:15:00 EDT

Cloud computing is slowly gaining credibility and traction in the enterprise world. As giants such as Google and Amazon productize their massive cloud infrastructures, moving enterprise applications to the public cloud seems a more realistic possibility. The advantages of an enterprise application leveraging the public cloud sound like utopia – lowered total cost of ownership and overhead costs, ease of maintenance, inherent high availability and scalability that is built into the infrastructure.

How to Diagnose Java Resource Starvation

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:45:00 EDT

We can visualize resource starvation using an elaborate rendition of the Dining Philosophers Problem. This classic metaphor of resource allocation among processes was first introduced in 1971 by Edsger Dijkstra in his paper “Hierarchical Ordering of Sequential Processes.” It’s been a model and universal method for verifying theories on resource allocation ever since.

Building Strategic Services for Your SOA

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Many enterprises are working with service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives using a variety of approaches. Regardless of the specific approaches undertaken, the intent is to build services and business processes for the organization to realize the benefits of SOA. However, you need to practice specific techniques to ensure that the service capabilities you are building are strategic.

SOA and the IT Pressure Cooker

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Market conditions are in a constant state of flux. The economy is, well, the economy. The regulatory environment shifts based on the latest business scandal and which political party holds sway. Plus, there is always a new management strategy to solve world hunger or something. As users struggle to keep up with this deluge, they frequently turn to their friends in IT for help.

The Network-Centric Computing Model

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:15:00 EDT

System architects and engineering teams are designing increasingly complex embedded systems in order to satisfy their customers’ stringent functionality and performance requirements. In addition, within tactical systems, it’s not uncommon to require deterministic real-time behavior while moving large quantities of information over non-deterministic network transports.

The Investment Virtues of "SOA in the Cloud"

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:45:00 EDT

In today’s economy, an enterprise must have strong financial motives for transitioning to SOA. SOA’s superior technical capabilities are a strong motive for information technology professionals to make that transition. However, enterprise stakeholders are motivated by solid investment opportunities. Software architects have learned how to express the technical virtues of SOA. What they need to learn next is how to express the investment virtues of SOA.

A Multi-Core Optimized Software Appliance

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:00:00 EDT

In the enterprise IT environment today, modern middleware technologies make it easier to expose existing or new business applications as sets of services. However, with the mashup of cloud-based services and enterprise data center services, the visibility of how a service created today will be used in the future gets murkier.

More SOA Transition Bang for Your IT Bucks

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:15:00 EDT

This article explains how an Open Source SOA Roadmap can use a typical Web application project’s funding as the basis for a successful SOA transition effort. It is the first of three articles that explains how open source technologies and techniques can be leveraged to successfully deliver SOA solutions given the current economic downturn.

Why SOA Is a Good Fit for CRM Solutions

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 10:15:00 EDT

Online commerce is no longer just for consumer products, but also for direct and indirect goods and services. As a result, new demands are placed on classic customer relationship management (CRM) applications. While most have successfully automated customer-facing interactions (such as order capture, configuration, pricing, and order query), they still rely on external systems to process subsequent steps (such as invoicing, fulfillment, and pick-pack-ship), which are completed in a back-office enterprise resource planning (ERP) application.

Leveraging Process Configuration in the Context of SOA

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:30:00 EDT

The value of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the concept of agility, or the ability to limit risk by managing change. Today, many enterprises are fighting to make this a reality, yet few approach SOA using the right methodologies and technology, and most have yet to define the real value of SOA and agility.

Improving the Efficiency of SOA-Based Applications

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:30:00 EDT

According to Moore’s Law, processing speed and storage capacity have been doubling about every two years since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. Yet it seems that our propensity for building larger more complex software systems that anticipate these improvements inevitably outpace the exponential growth in capacity to support these systems.

The Future of SOA

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:30:00 EDT

As consumers we are accustomed to the end-user experience of the Internet. With HTTP and XML, you don’t need to have a specific application on your computer to make use of external data – you can just open a browser window and do a search or visit a particular Web site to find the information you need.