Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to developing and organizing application and IT resources in a flexible manner to deliver business agility, which is increasingly vital for success in today's competitive and dynamic global economy. In a SOA, the application functionality is packaged as discrete, autonomous services that adhere to standards-based interfaces, and the services are then deployed in an architecture that promotes their most effective use. The component services can be individually developed and then assembled or re-assembled as needed to create new business offerings.
To preserve the architectural principles of a SOA, and thus the business benefits, non-core application functionality such as security must be externalized from business logic and provided as a service. More specifically, the management and decisioning of access rights, or entitlements, must be made available as a robust infrastructure service that can be shared and leveraged across many applications. It is important to note that while administration and resolution of policy must be externalized for an effective SOA, it is less important to separate access policy enforcement because it is often closely tied to the underlying business logic. In some scenarios, however, policy enforcement should also be de-coupled from the service.
The primary drivers for externalizing entitlement administration, decisioning, and auditing from SOA applications include:
- The need to centrally review and audit entitlement policies and usage across interconnected service components has become exponentially more important in the face of increasing government regulation.
- The need to enable independent development of business logic from security policy, which are often governed by disparate organizational domains.
- The need to preserve the option to re-use component services in unanticipated ways mandates that entitlement decisions be made outside the core business logic.
- The need to deliver higher levels of governance, which is difficult to achieve, without a strong framework for entitlement management.
In evaluating potential solutions for Entitlement Management, it is important to seek products that are standards-based, architected for distributed policy administration, decisioning, and enforcement, and can deliver the depth in policy expression and enforcement required by a SOA application. Securent's Entitlement Management Solution (EMS) is designed for the most demanding and complex SOA environments with its support for XACML and other industry standards, three-tier architecture for policy administration, decisioning, and enforcement, and rich policy engine.
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Date |
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A Securent Whitepaper |
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848KB |
04/30/2007 |
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A ZapThink Whitepaper |
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433KB |
04/30/2007 |
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