Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

  BI, Business Intelligence, has taken hold at almost every mid-size or larger IT organization.  It commonly means extracting key data elements from all the main systems and databases in the organization and compiling it all together in the Business Intelligence Data Warehouse.  And the primary method for doing this is ETL – extract, transform, and load.  Basically meaning batch-style data loads performed daily, weekly, or monthly (from the source systems to the data warehouse). Setting it up is expensive and time consuming as it requires building a large capacity database and ETL processes for every important data source in the company.  The ETL processes by themselves are often not enough as data duplication and data quality problems quickly float to the surface and have to be resolved to a sufficient level to continue (resolved in the data warehouse, not in the data sources). However, it’s relatively easy to demonstrate the business value of the res...

Jason Bloomberg over at Zapthink has a devastating indictment of vendors selling “Private Clouds” and “Platform as a Service”. If you’re headed towards cloud computing (and we all are, it’s just a question of how long over the next decade till you get there), read it.

Web service security is a tricky business.  EVERY service exposed by any service provider, be it .Net, Java, the Mainframe, or any other provider needs to be secured.  Certainly if it’s exposing sensitive data (say customer data), allowing activation of a business process, and most especially if it’s involving a financial transaction. But how do you do it?  While every vendor and (almost) every technology announces compatibility with every web service security buzzword (WS-Security, SAML, X.509, etc.), they don’t describe how to actually make use of all this security data attached to the web service request. I’ve had recent discussions with IBM, Oracle, and Software AG (as leading SOA middleware tool providers) on this exact topic and the results are disappointing. The architecture model for this says that to provide SOA security I should use the tools as a SOA security layer, allowing my services to go about their business and the security tools to grab and pr...