Layer 7 Technologies has released its SecureSpan XML Firewall as a virtual soft appliance for service-oriented architectures.
The idea is to enable enterprises and services providers to deploy a SOA security appliance on commodity server hardware and VMware virtualized computing platforms more quickly and at lower cost, while at the same time improving architectural flexibility.
The new product has the same features as Layer 7s SecureSpan XML Firewall hardware appliance and allows users to have identical XML Firewall hardware appliance functionality on any server infrastructure running VMware Player, VMware Server or VMware ESX.
“An XML Firewall addresses both service security and service delivery assurance requirements essential for moving pilot services into production,” said Dimitri Sirota, vice president of marketing for Layer 7 Technologies, in Washington.
“One of the big advantages of an XML Firewall in general for addressing SOA security and assurance is the fact that operational policies can be defined declaratively through graphical [user interfaces] and applied consistently across distributed services. No coding is required on the services themselves,” Sirota said.
For a virtual appliance, an administrator can use a browser to define and orchestrate policies and provision them to the XML Firewall in real time, he added.
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Sirota said the company wants to separate itself from its rivals by its deployment options, support for federated environments and scalability. New instances of the virtual appliance can be created on the fly, and support for multitenant environments has been simplified, he said.
In addition, the product offers interoperability with Layer 7s SecureSpan hardware appliances.
The soft appliance is now available for a free 15-day trial.
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