SOA Security 2009: Products And Specifications

As enterprise architects set their organization's strategy for service-oriented architecture (SOA) security, they will have to filter through a variety of standards, emerging specifications, and products that can contribute features and functions for securing SOA-based services. The core standard, WS-Security, has a critical mass of user adoption, but advanced specifications are not so far along. At least 10 product categories can provide parts of a comprehensive SOA security architecture, yet there are many large areas of functional overlap between the categories. The variety of standards and products provides many options for SOA security, but it also makes strategy development notably more complex. The foundation of your SOA security strategy is a strong understanding of the current and future business scenarios in which you will need secure services. A typical first step in an SOA security strategy is to start with simple standards usage and products you already own.