Securing Web Services

by Paul Greenfield

Given the absolute flood of vision statements, marketing fanfare, and press releases coming from the software industry over the past few years, by now anyone reading this Executive Report must, at the very least, have heard of Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Although the introduction of Web services was accompanied by the usual -- and deliberate -- marketing-led confusion and blatant rebranding, this is all fading as the software industry has declared an end to hostilities and reached a consensus about what Web services mean. Web services have now even been around long enough for usable standards and products to start to emerge. Fairly mature implementations of the core Web services standards are now widely available from most major vendors, and some have even been proven in early production applications by adventurous organizations. Web services are starting to move from futuristic vision to a pragmatic and useful set of technologies.