Cloud Expo on Ulitzer

Layer 7 Technologies, a security and governance company for SOA and Cloud Computing, announced the general availability of the Layer 7 Enterprise Service Manager (ESM).

Fully embedded within each SecureSpan Gateway, the ESM allows organizations to address critical service and administration requirements from a single, central location. SecureSpan customers can now 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.

“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.”

Using the ESM dashboard and a number of configurable reports, administrators can gain both a real-time and historical view of key performance indicators, gaining insight into the health and performance of their SOA landscape, while facilitating trouble-shooting and capacity planning for their SecureSpan Gateway implementation. Additionally, organizations can automate the migration of policies across environments – from development to test to production; from the enterprise to the cloud; and across geographies. Discrepancies between environments (i.e., differing IP addresses, inconsistent role-based access controls, or differently named IT resources such as LDAPs) are automatically flagged for resolution, insulating administrators from identity and topology issues while dramatically decreasing risk of migration and promoting a consistent security model.

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. In much the same way, ESM can be used to facilitate the migration of service prototypes from the cloud back into the enterprise. Additionally, organizations that require the ability to provision services in the cloud when demand begins to exceed their internal computing resources can use the ESM to quickly clone services between the enterprise and the cloud, facilitating cloud bursting and disaster recovery.

“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. “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.”

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