This week, From the Vault – our weekly series highlighting classic resources from the Layer 7 Resource Library  – steps back into the Cloud. Our goal with the white paper Steer Safely into the Clouds was to outline a secure path for Cloud adoption. With a great many drivers pointing enterprises towards the Cloud, this is pretty vital information.

This white paper is also a vital document for us because it outlines the governance philosophy underpinning all our Cloud solutions. It’s increasingly true that everybody wants to be in the Cloud but a move to the Cloud introduces new security risks and may compromise traditional IT governance. That’s where our Cloud governance philosophy comes in.

The way we see it, Cloud governance is a logical evolution of existing SOA governance best practices. It offers a way to assert control over both internal and external applications and data. This white paper should be enough to convince you that, using Cloud governance, the widely reported challenges of Cloud computing can be met.

Download Steer Safely into the Clouds

Our weekly From the Vault series highlights classic resources from the Layer 7 Library. This week, we’ve got not one but two items, both of which will prove highly valuable to anyone who is researching options for purchasing or replacing a SOA Gateway – a white paper called Not All SOA Gateways are Created Equal and a webinar called How to Choose a SOA Gateway.

Not All SOA Gateways are Created Equal notes that most Gateways on the market are able to address a good deal of the most common functional requirements. However, the white paper explains, the total cost of ownership (TCO) varies widely between Gateways – and TCO extends well beyond the initial licensing fees to encompass a range of significant factors.

The white paper goes on to examine those factors that will have the greatest impact on TCO, namely:

• Ease of deployment and customization
• Manageability, scalability and reliability
• Cost of upgrade or repurchasing

Click here to find out more about the white paper and to download the PDF

How to Choose a SOA Gateway expands upon the content of this white paper to provide business managers with practical instructions on which key operational and functional needs, as well as potential pitfalls, to consider when selecting a SOA Gateway, including:

• Portability considerations
• Scalability risks
• Extensibility and upgradeability needs
• Global management implications
• Hidden operational costs

You can either click here to find out more about the webinar and to download a copy or you can stream it in the player below, courtesy of the Layer 7 YouTube channel:

A week ago, we began a weekly series of blog posts on key content from the Layer 7 Resource Library. We started things off by bringing about our Expanding Role of XML Gateways in SOA, Mobile & Cloud webinar. This week we’re going to stick with the same general area of interest but focus in a bit on the specific uses of Gateways in SOA.

Our white paper The Role of XML Gateways in SOA is consistently one of the most popular items in the Resource Library, which goes to show that the topic of SOA is still on a lot of people’s minds. This white paper explains how XML Gateways deliver “application networking” functionality, making it possible to complete critical SOA tasks without programming.

In contrast to conventional networking devices, XML gateways specialize in the application-level protocols rendered within XML or Web services messages. An XML gateway can rapidly inspect and process XML messages to efficiently perform a range of processes vital to SOA, including content routing protocol switching, data transformation and identity authentication.

By doing so, XML gateways make it easy for SOA architects to:

• Implement security
• Optimize performance
• Enable advanced policy operations

To get more detailed insight into the value of XML gateways to SOA deployments, download the white paper.