Business has long pursued the goal of making IT more of a strategic tool and
less of a necessary evil. Organizations are constantly looking for easier,
cheaper, and more logical ways to build applications and unite the silos of
functionality they still depend on. One approach that has met with some
success is the concept of just-in-time integration - a technique to combine
new functionalities as quickly and cheaply as required, whether they reside
inside an organization or outside of it (i.e., with a business partner).
From the architectural perspective, just-in-time integration is a cornerstone
of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Under SOA, applications consist of
aggregations of calls to services. Services are simply coarsely grained
functions that are made availa... (more)
Securing access to information is basic to any application. Security becomes
even more critical for implementations structured according to SOA principles
due to their loose coupling of services and applications and their operation
across organizational boundaries. Such an environment often exposes the
delicacy or limitations of existing security implementations.
Irrespective of the effic... (more)