William Bathurst

One of the challenges IT organizations face is how to propagate identities in complex business processes that are commonly found in Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). Identities, which are passed from one service invocation to the next in a business process, give the process a user context. Identities can be used to determine access rights to SOA services and for audit and compliance purposes. For example, consider a procurement business process for an application that's used by a number of purchasing agents. Each agent has a different purchasing privilege. Say a senior agent can purchase up to $50,000 in a transaction, while a junior agent can buy only $25,000. If the business process that enables the purchase is composed of a number of SOA services, each service must know the user's identity to enforce purchasing privileges. This article shows the need for ide... (more)

Extending Identity Management Solutions Into a SOA

Companies are under tremendous pressure to meet the complex business requirements found in their IT infrastructures. For example, they need to expose their applications to external trading partners, comply with government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, integrate merged companies or their own complex application environments. One common solution path that helps solve these problems is to adopt a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which allows companies to be more agile in meeting their business needs. When a company begins to expose their business processes in a SOA, then t... (more)

Extending Identity Management Solutions Into a SOA

Companies are under tremendous pressure to meet the complex business requirements found in their IT infrastructures. For example, they need to expose their applications to external trading partners, comply with government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, integrate merged companies or their own complex application environments. One common solution path that helps solve these problems is to adopt a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which allows companies to be more agile in meeting their business needs. When a company begins to expose their business processes in a SOA, then t... (more)