The first and foremost feature of an IBM DataPower is as a security device. However, most organizations turn their Datapower over to their security team and ignore it afterwards. The security team(s) generally use it as a perimeter security device – as a firewall and filter for exposing SOA services out to the Internet (or via VPN connections, as who can trust a vendor’s network anymore). It works in this capacity very well but is far more capable than just this narrow role. With SOA breaking down the outer perimeter of our internal applications, security must now be layered and extended to EVERY exposed service or interface. There’s two general approaches to providing this: The agent based model, where an agent is installed upon every server / application / application container and controls access to each service. The other is an agentless model, where each web service is routed through a control point – in this case the Datapower, and the...
Enough hype! Real ROI - Let's put these technologies to work!