Cloud Services Broker announcement from Vordel

Vordel announced "Cloud Service Broker" at their annual VordelWorld user conference last week, in an attempt to bring trust and reliability to Cloud Computing. One of the major concerns customers have in adopting cloud computing is security. Hope this will solve some of those concerns bridging the gap between internal SOA apps and Cloud services, leading to broader adoption of Cloud Computing.

See http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS130253+05-Nov-2009+BW20091105

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR1 PS1 (Patchset 1) released

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR1 PS1 (Patchset 1) aka 11.1.1.2 was released on Nov 10, 2009, and generally available now.
Many enhancements and bug fixes for OWSM went into this patchset.
Some notable ones are listed below. For a complete set of enhancements visit product documentation here.

What's new in OWSM 11gR1 PS1 (11.1.1.2)?

• Common Policy Store across multiple Weblogic domains (11gR1 policy store was restricted to be one per domain)
  
• One policy accepting multiple types of tokens such as username, SAML, X.509 through the policy alternatives feature
• Ability to set up different sign/encryption keys for different services instead of all services having to use the common sign/encryption keys set at the domain level - This has been implemented using configuration overrides feature for service policies (11gR1 allowed only client side config overrides)
• Ability to configure operation level authorization using Permission based authorization policies
• Ease of Use features
  
• Publishing service certificate in the WSDL - client policies can directly lookup service certificate from WSDL instead of looking up from client keystore
• Policy attachment through WLST scripting - useful for creating automation scripts
• Enhanced support for asynchronous services and policies for it
• Certifications and Interoperability
• OWSM Interoperability certified against Axis 1.4 and WSS4J 1.58 security stacks
• Documentation on Interoperability with other security stacks moved to a new guide Oracle Fusion Middleware Interoperability Guide for Oracle Web Services Manager
• WS-I BSP compliance
• Policies can be stored in Microsoft SQL Server based MDS repository

Additionally, for a list of important OWSM bug fixes, known issues and workarounds associated with 11gR1 PS1 release, please refer to the release notes.

HowTo - OWSM 11g: Checking health of policy manager application

OWSM Policy Manager is the central application that has the task of distributing policies to the OWSM agents (embedded in WLS) for enforcement. For diagnosing problems, it's important to first check if the policy manager application is running okay or not.

You can check the health of policy manager by invoking
http://:/wsm-pm/validator
It's a protected url, so you need to enter WLS adminstrator username/password.
This should return a list of all the policies and assertion templates similar to below.

Presenting at VordelWorld User Conference

Vordel, and XML Gateway company, is holding it's annual user conference VordelWorld in Dublin from Nov 4-6, 2009. This year's spotlight is on SOA and cloud governance. There's a nice lineup of presentations including Burton Group's Richard Watson on "Cloud Application Architecture", Amazon Web Services Evangelist Steve Riley on "Fear the cloud no more", and Vordel CTO Mark O'Neill on "Governing Cloud Connections".

While I can't wait to hear these speakers talk on the hot topic of security and governance in the cloud, I'll be presenting on the topic of "Role of XML Gateways in Identity Management (IdM) infrastructure" and cover briefly on how XML Gateways can help mediate security to the cloud.