SOA Appliance for Cloud Computing

Building a robust SOA is a pre-requisite to cloud computing. Without solid provisions for SOA Testing, SOA Governance, and Federated SOA, large enterprises will unlikely embark on cloud computing initiatives that truly span Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Services (PaaS), or Software as Service (SaaS).

The article below shows one of the core building blocks required for an enterprise SOA deployments - Identity Management and Enforcement. Forum Systems has recently announced Forum STS - a SOA Appliance that enables Cloud computing by managing identities within and across SOA domains. For more details, see article published by Liz McMillan:

SOA Appliance for Cloud Computing
— Web services-based Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) enable communication via ubiquitous standards such as XML and SOAP. To foster efficient, effective message exchange and satisfy increasing user demands for real-time, aggregated information from internal and external business partners, trust must be established among all entities. Comprehensive mediation, authentication, and authorization of identity exchange among customer and partner portals, Web applications, and XML-based Web services provide the business with a simplified, coherent model for identity management and build the pillars of Federated SOA.