Mobile applications have tremendous value for a mobile sales force. The example we took was a sales manager who is on the road and wishes to access enterprise data securely, directly from the mobile device. We took two examples of data – localized revenue information and the protection of personally identifiable information. In the first example this is a revenue report of local retail stores, which might be accessed by a manager on the road using the location of the tablet or smartphone.

In the second example we can take that same manager and assume he is hiring new employees and has to enter sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) such as a social security number, name, address, date of birth or maybe a driver’s license number.

Here is what the architecture looks like:

On the right hand side we have the Enterprise and the existing architecture. In this example we assumed the Enterprise has a RESTful service for handling new hire information and a SOAP web service for querying revenue information. Further, we assumed the Enterprise currently uses Active Directory for its identities.

Using the Intel(R) Expressway API Manager as a mobile middleware we can put a RESTful facade in front of these disparate systems and expose two simple endpoints for the mobile device. Further, the gateway performs important functions, including:

• The termination and acceleration of SSL (remember, with mobile, you may easily scale to hundreds of thousands of individual “apps”, all hitting the back-end infrastrcture)
• Perimeter security for content based threats, such as SQL injection
• Delegated authentication to the Enterprise LDAP based on an API key in the request
• Throttling of requests, including denial of service protection (remember, again, with mobile devices there could be thousands)
• Optimization of content sent back to the device. In our example we showed the transformation of XML to JSON, which is optimized for the mobile phone
• Data protection, including format preserving encryption, a special mode of AES that prefers the length and character set of data-types. This is especially useful for handling the new hire information, such as the social security number
• Routing and composition of data accessed form multiple databases. Mobile applications may need to aggregate data from multiple databases, combine it into a single response before it is sent to the mobile device

The best part about the Intel(R) Expressway API Manager is that this entire flow can all be designed in Eclipse using drag-and-drop actions. No coding is required. If you are looking for a quick way to jump-start a native mobile application at your enterprise with minimal back-end changes, give us a shout. We may be able to help!

-Blake