As 2012 begins, it definitely seems like Cloud computing will continue to be a hot issue in enterprise IT, with the impetus driving large organizations into the Cloud continuing to gather pace. Consequently, there’s going to be a growing need for information on how services run in the Cloud can be governed in order to ensure data security and maximize performance.

Many of Layer 7’s customers have already made the move into the Cloud. These companies have benefited greatly from our expertise in governance for SOA. This is because SOA governance is directly applicable to the Cloud. Our white paper The Value of Application Service Governance for Cloud Computing provides a detailed explanation of this connection.

Written by internationally-respected SOA/Cloud thought leader David Linthicum, in collaboration with our own Scott Morrison, this white paper outlines how the structure of SOA – services distributed across departments and locations – is at the core of all Cloud computing. So, governance principles that are effective in SOA also work in the Cloud.

To learn more, download The Value of Application Service Governance for Cloud Computing.

Enterprise IT is becoming more complex. Companies are investing in systems that promise great benefits in terms of connectivity and cost-effectiveness but, to really make the most of these investments, they need control over and visibility into how systems connect across departments, environments and locations. Introduce the Cloud and things can get really complicated.

This summer, we presented a webinar that addressed these specific issues. Created in association with Red Hat, Security, Governance & Integration in a Cloud-Connected World provided deep insight into how enterprises can address integration, management and security challenges arising from technologies like SOA and Cloud.

With input from Pierre Fricke, Director of SOA Products at Red Hat, as well as Jaime Ryan, our Partner Solutions Architect, this webinar proposed combining an enterprise service bus with a SOA Gateway to create a secure, standards-based system for governing integrations that cross organizational boundaries. You can stream the full recording in the player below.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol8YO9F3O7k&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]

This week’s dip into the Layer 7 archive provides real-world advice on how providers of Cloud services can securely expose their APIs to third-party developers. Featuring input from eBay Chief Security Strategist Liam Lynch, Managing API Security in SaaS & Cloud will definitely be of interest to anyone who enjoyed our recent Webinar with Best Buy and Amazon Web Services.

For Cloud providers, API publishing has become critical to enabling integration with enterprise systems, sharing information across affiliate Web sites and providing mobile access to services. Of course, Cloud computing and API publishing create all sorts of new security concerns, which is where secure integration providers like Layer 7 come in.

This webinar was co-presented with our friends at the Cloud Security Alliance but it’s about more than just security. A truly safe and secure API publishing programming will have to tackle the full range of API management concerns. Specifically, Cloud API publishers need ways to address versioning and to meter consumption without burdening either developers or consumers.

To find out more, you can read about the webinar on the Layer 7 Web site or simply watch the recording in the player below.

While APIs may be nothing new, the whole concept of “API management” is still pretty fresh. It’s probably a term you’re going to start hearing more and more, though – simply because more and more organizations are going to start discovering they need ways to secure and manage their APIs.

Over the last few years, social media and mobile devices have provided all sorts of organizations with the motivation they need to start publicly exposing data and services they would previously have kept private. Clearly, this raises security and management concerns, especially for larger enterprises with valuable data to protect and reputations to maintain.

While API management products have been on the market since at least 2006, there’s still fairly limited understanding of what a fully-functional API management solution looks like – or should look like. Earlier this year, we published our Choosing the Right API Management Solution for the Enterprise User white paper, to help enterprises fill in the blanks.

So, if you’d like to learn the key functional and operational requirements for an API management solution, just download this white paper.

At the end of last month, we announced that Layer 7 had been named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 growth company and had been positioned as a leader in Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies. Today, we’re very proud to announce that Forrester Research, Inc. has named Layer 7 a Leader in a new report, The Forrester Wave™: SOA Application Gateways, Q4 2011.

The report groups its criteria into three high-level categories: Current Offering, Strategy and Market Presence. Layer 7’s “SecureSpan SOA Gateway scored well in all of the major functional categories.” In fact, we actually had the highest score in the Current Offering category and the Strategy category. As a Leader, we were recognized for our broad and deep support for messaging styles, attack protection, trust enablement and content transformation.

Top vendors were evaluated, so we feel it’s a great honor to be positioned as a Leader in this SOA Application Gateways Wave. For more information on the report, read our press release.