SOA Security (Paperback)

by Ramarao Kanneganti (Author), Prasad Chodavarapu (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
SOA is one of the latest technologies enterprises are using to tame their software costs - in development, deployment, and management. SOA makes integration easy, helping enterprises not only better utilize their existing investments in applications and infrastructure, but also open up new business opportunities. However, one of the big stumbling blocks in executing SOA is security. This book addresses Security in SOA with detailed examples illustrating the theory, industry standards and best practices.

It is true that security is important in any system. SOA brings in additional security concerns as well rising out of the very openness that makes it attractive. If we apply security principles blindly, we shut ourselves of the benefits of SOA. Therefore, we need to understand which security models and techniques are right for SOA. This book provides such an understanding.

Usually, security is seen as an esoteric topic that is better left to experts. While it is true that security requires expert attention, everybody, including software developers, designers, architects, IT administrators and managers need to do tasks that require very good understanding of security topics. Fortunately, traditional security techniques have been around long enough for people to understand and apply them in practice. This, however, is not the case with SOA Security.

Anyone seeking to implement SOA Security is today forced to dig through a maze of inter-dependent specifications and API docs that assume a lot of prior experience on the part of readers. Getting started on a project is hence proving to be a huge challenge to practitioners. This book seeks to change that. It provides bottom-up understanding of security techniques appropriate for use in SOA without assuming any prior familiarity with security topics on the part of the reader.

Unlike most other books about SOA that merely describe the standards, this book helps you get started immediately by walking you through sample code that illustrates how real life problems can be solved using the techniques and best practices described in standards. Whereas standards discuss all possible variations of each security technique, this book focusses on the 20% of variations that are used 80% of the time. This keeps the material covered in the book simple as well as self-sufficient for all readers except the most advanced.

About the Author
Dr. Tamarao (Rama) Kanneganti is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at HCL EAI Services. Rama has a Ph.D. in programming languages from Rice University and has worked at Bell Labs in databases and large programming systems. Currently, he advises enterprise clients in formulating and evaluating SOA strategies. Rama works out of Grosse Pointe Woods (near Detroit), Michigan, USA.

Prasad A. Chodavarapu is General Manager (Technology) at HCL EAI Services, Bangalore, India. Prasad leads service teams designing and deploying integration solutions at enterprises world-wide. Prasad's current focus is on the use of application-oriented networking technologies to implement and secure SOA.

Product Details

• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications (January 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932394680
• ISBN-13: 978-1932394689
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #498,037 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A practioners perspective but also useful to policy and decision makers, January 24, 2008

By	Prime Member (CA, USA) - See all my reviews

One of the detailed expositions on this subject that I have seen. While it is written to help the architects, designers and developers of services to plan and implement better security, it also gives an excellent overview of the key concepts and challenges.

The book tries to address two key audience groups. One segment is the one with an interest in the broad policy and governance issues related to Security as applied to SOA and service. The other audience segment is from the IT architecture and implementation teams that want to see examples of security as applied to services in the new SOA world. Application and process security issues are explained and illustrated with extensive code samples with detailed walk-throughs of several scenarios.

It is NOT a generic textbook on basics of security or SOA or BPM but is focused on practical issues in architecting and implementing security within SOA and BPM solutions.

There are specific examples of various security models and implementations, including appropriate use of PKI in messages and services, SAML, etc. The authors have provided extensive examples at the publishers website and one of the co-authors has posted some useful links to external reviews and interviews. This was one of the few published books that I have seen discuss Cisco's AON solution.

If you are looking for broader security issues such as intrusion detection, network security, etc. then this is the wrong book. The focus is on Security when implementing a Service Oriented Architecture in an enterprise environment.

The book is physically HEAVY and a very detailed but easy read. I do not recommend reading all the chapters and even the authors seem to agree. It is best to read the initial chapters to cover the concepts and then dive into specific chapters of interest.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars good book, May 2, 2008

By	Haruo Horii "soa reader" (Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Security is indespensable for web services, but difficult to understand and use. There are too many standatds relevant to security, W3C standards and OASIS. I think to understand whole structure need much time. It seems architecture or principle is required to consistent understanding. This book is good to grasp security standard structure. It is regrettable that this book seems written before 2007, the rush of new standards. I hope this book is maintained to the latest standards. Nonetheless it is good for readers to understand security standards structure.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good start before securing SOA, June 13, 2008

By	J. Isacenkova (Southern France) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The main goal of this book (as stated in introduction section) is to give a reader good background knowledge on security in order to facilitate the implementation of security in SOA-based systems. This book is not for security experts, it is more for people who have to deal with security without having previous experience. It helps to answer the questions like how to secure collaborating Web services, what are the common practices.
Nevertheless, the book does not cover all the topics, however, mostly the basic ones. I found this book helpful to understand the fundamental instruments used in SOA security and continued with my own more specific and advanced solutions.