Scott Morrison

Business has long pursued the goal of making IT more of a strategic tool and less of a necessary evil. Organizations are constantly looking for easier, cheaper, and more logical ways to build applications and unite the silos of functionality they still depend on. One approach that has met with some success is the concept of just-in-time integration - a technique to combine new functionalities as quickly and cheaply as required, whether they reside inside an organization or outside of it (i.e., with a business partner). From the architectural perspective, just-in-time integration is a cornerstone of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Under SOA, applications consist of aggregations of calls to services. Services are simply coarsely grained functions that are made availa... (more)

Propagating Security Context Across a Distributed Web Services Environment

It's a problem as old as networked computing. Consider two applications. They negotiate a level of trust. How can that trust - or security context - be transferred to a third application, one that may exist in an entirely different security domain from the first? This problem has been solved before, but is limited by proprietary solutions that resist integration. The challenge now, which ... (more)

Is SOA Ready to Move from the Whiteboards and into Production IT?

Is SOA ready to move from the whiteboards and into production IT? As you might have guessed, the answer remains a disappointing sort of. The issue comes down to tools and infrastructure, and the fact that only some SOA components are mature and easy to source. The application server market is largely commoditized and the world is awash with IDEs that automatically generate and deploy SOA... (more)

Finally, the Killer PKI Application

Enterprise PKI has a bad name. Complex, costly, difficult to deploy and maintain - all these criticisms have dogged this technology since it first appeared. To the dismay of so many CIOs, few applications have stepped up to make effective use of PKI. But this may soon change: Web services promotes a security model that demands the flexibility that an enterprise PKI deployment can offer. ... (more)

The Challenge of Web Services Security Inside the Firewall - A true story from the consulting trenches

True story from the consulting trenches: the operations staff had left hours ago, shaking their heads and reluctantly leaving the consultants to resolve a problem with their code. It was well past midnight, in the middle of winter, in a town many time zones from home. The project was late. Altogether, this was an awkward situation that you probably know well. The consultants - falling int... (more)