KuppingerCole analyst Craig Burton (of Burton Group originally) wrote a recent article about Façade proxies. You can read the article here: http://blogs.kuppingercole.com/burton/2013/03/18/the-faade-proxy/

As Craig notes,

“A Façade is an object that provides simple access to complex – or external – functionality. It might be used to group together several methods into a single one, to abstract a very complex method into several simple calls or, more generically, to decouple two pieces of code where there’s a strong dependency of one over the other. By writing a Façade with the single responsibility of interacting with the external Web service, you can defend your code from external changes. Now, whenever the API changes, all you have to do is update your Façade. Your internal application code will remain untouched.”

I call this “Touchless Proxy”. We have been doing the touchless gateway for over a decade, and now using the same underlying concept, we provide touchless API gateway or a façade proxy.

While Intel is highlighted in a strong note in this analyst note by KuppingerCole, Craig raises the following point:

“When data leaves any school, healthcare provider, financial services or government office, the presence of sensitive data is always a concern.”

This is especially timely as the healthcare providers, financial institutions, and educational institutions rush to expose their data using APIs to their partners.

When we were designing our API management platform that is one of the things we had in mind – Providing a context aware data protection. I wrote an article a few months ago about this, which you can read here. Essentially, not only Intel API solution can detect the sensitive data flowing through the APIs, but it can take action based on the identity, location, invocation and context of the requesting party. This is essentially important as we connect all IoTs (Internet of Things) and have M2M take over the enterprise. You can sense the PCI, PII and other sensitive data, using our Token Broker (ETB) complimentary solution to Intel API Manager, and you can choose to either tokenize the data (the original data will be stored in a secure vault of your choice and location), encrypt the data, or provide a Format Preserving Encryption (FPE) that will allow you to encrypt the data yet maintain the original format of the data.

Check out cloudsecurity.intel.com for more details.

The post The Façade Proxy appeared first on Application Security.