SOA Software, Layer 7 Announce New Governance Solutions

SOA Software has announced a new cloud services governance initiative known as Atmosphere.

SOA Software's Atmosphere initiative creates a unifying brand for a suite of SOA (service oriented architecture) and cloud services governance products the company will deliver through 2010. The Atmosphere products will help companies realize the enormous cost and agility benefits possible with the combination of SOA and cloud services governance, SOA Software officials said.

The first product in the suite is Atmosphere Broker, a cloud services broker providing service governance capabilities including visibility, management, monitoring, measurement, provisioning, validation, and reporting for cloud services.  It can be deployed, at the service consumer, in the cloud at the service provider, or as part of an independent cloud service brokerage to govern access, performance, delivery of cloud services. Atmosphere Broker includes advanced registry/repository, policy validation, management, security and reporting capabilities.

“Atmosphere products will help our customers and partners realize the enormous benefits offered by the combination of SOA and cloud computing,” said Paul Gigg, president and CEO of SOA Software, in a statement.  “SOA Software, already acknowledged by Gartner as a leader in integrated SOA governance, is uniquely positioned to deliver unified SOA and cloud services governance.”

The Atmosphere product family will govern the plan, build and run processes for SOA and cloud services initiatives, the company said. Atmosphere Broker will be available in 2010, the company said.

“Governing the interactions between consumers and service providers will be a mandate for any company using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or other cloud services and offerings," said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and fellow at Gartner, in a statement. "Even when the need for trust is minimal, formally acknowledging that level of trust should be a mandate. The more you increase your dependence on cloud services, the more you will need to establish and implement your required degree of trust between the consumers and providers of the service. It will not be a 'one size fits all' determination.”

Meanwhile, Layer 7 Technologies, a provider of security and governance software for SOA and the cloud, on December 7 announced the general availability of the Layer 7 Enterprise Service Manager (ESM).

Layer 7 officials said the ESM in integrated with the company's SecureSpan X M L appliances and enables enterprises to address service and administration requirements from a single, central location. With ESM, SecureSpan customers can simplify operations management across the enterprise and into the cloud by centrally provisioning globally distributed datacenters, implementing disaster recovery initiatives, remotely maintaining/updating systems and managing the policy lifecycle – all from a single Web-based dashboard, Layer 7 officials said.

“As organizations extend their on-premises computing infrastructure to cloud-based infrastructure, security and management policy should extend with it,” said Neil MacDonald, vice president and Gartner fellow. “This means that security policy enforcement points must become virtualized and capable of enforcing policy independent of physical location or network topology while providing a centralized way of managing polices and configurations, regardless of where the workload resides.”

Companies looking to prototype new services in the cloud can leverage ESM to clone their security policies between the enterprise and their cloud implementation, creating a consistent security model across their extended enterprise.

“As a SOA implementation grows over time, the cost and complexity of managing the infrastructure and associated Web services also increases,” said Phil Walston, vice president of development and product management at Layer 7, in a statement. “With the launch of the Enterprise Service Manager, our customers can now rapidly scale their SOA roll-out by managing all their Gateways and policies – across the extended enterprise and into the cloud – from a single dashboard, significantly reducing their total cost of ownership.”