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Open integration and security: XML firewalls provide ease of integration and security.

Article Excerpt
The good news about XML and Web services is that they're easier than ever to develop and deploy--inside the firewall between internal applications, on the Internet with your customers and partners ... anywhere.

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The superb new development tools from companies like Microsoft, BEA, IBM, and others, combined with the simplicity and openness of die standards, are providing real dividends to enterprises today. The examples are numerous: financial services companies outsourcing employee compensation, hightech manufacturers integrating their supply chains, and global banks integrating their trading systems with partners, just to name a few.

But the bad news about XML and Web services is this: because they're so much easier to develop and deploy and for your customers and partners to connect to, it's that much easier (1) for your customers and partners to connect to them in ways you don't like, and (2) for everyone else to connect to them in ways you really don't like. With your critical systems exposed on the Internet, there ate many new ways they can be vulnerable to any number of new threats (see Figure 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

What's exhibiting itself here is an age-old tension between ease-of-integration concerns and security concerns. In general, the easier you make it to integrate your systems, the harder it is to secure them, and vice versa.

As an example, consider e-mail. E-mail was originally designed for ultimate interoperability, and has evolved to be able to work on any system, regardless of technology. It uses plain, unencrypted text (of sometimes simple HTML) and very little in the way of security techniques. Efforts to make e-mail infrastructure more secure (like digital signatures) have largely...