Security Gateways

I was at dinner with a friend who was considering enrolling in a survey class on client side web technologies. The course would cover things like JavaScript, Silverlight, HTML5, Adobe flash and the like. As she was talking, I was playing with my new Samsung Galaxy Note 2, which if you are not familiar, is somewhere between a traditional smartphone and a tablet. As a side note, that phone is pretty awesome in my book. As she was talking about the course I gave her the phone and told her to look up the definition of a word, any word, first using the Internet and then next using an “App.” This is a simple task of course, but the experience of doing this using the web versus an app has an extremely high ‘clunkiness’ factor to it. For the web experience, you press “Internet”, go to Google, search for “dictionary”, find one or two of the top ranked dictionary sites, wait ... (more)

Why are APIs so popular?

Kin Lane recently wrote a couple of blogs about why copyrighting an API is not common. I couldn’t agree more that copyrighting APIs is uncommon. First of all, the API definition is just an interface (It is the implementation detail that is important, and needs to be guarded), so it doesn’t make any sense to copyright an interface. (It is almost like copyrighting a pretty face ). Secondly, the whole idea of exposing an API is you are looking for others to finish the work you started by just providing the plumbing work. Why would anyone want to get involved with a copyrighted API a... (more)

Intel Expressway API Manager and The Rise of Mobile Middleware

I just returned from an exhilarating trip to the Gartner AADI show in Las Vegas last week. There are a lot of exciting things happening at Intel in the Data-center Software Division (DSD), especially with respect to the Expressway Product Line. First, we had our first live demo of the integrated solution that showcases Intel(R) Expressway API Manager and the Mashery API Management Portal. This is a true best of breed match between what we think is one of the best security gateways in the market and the de-facto market leader in API management, bringing the best possible product ... (more)

Content / Context / Device Aware Cloud Data Protection

In this two-part blog, I am going to talk about the Intel Cloud Data protection solution that helps our customers utilize their data, in both a context and content-aware manner. This is a newer set of technologies that has hit the market in the last few years. In the past, we used to think just encrypting the transport layer (such as TLS/SSL) was good enough. Given the complex nature of services and API composition, we quickly realized that it was not enough. Then we moved to protect the messages (most of the time,  the entire message), or at a field level to protect the specifi... (more)

Context Aware Data Privacy | Part 2

If you missed my Part 1 of this article, you can read it here when you get a chance (link). As a continuation to part 1, where I discussed the issues with Data Protection, we will explore how to solve some of those issues in this article. People tend to forget that hackers are attacking your systems for one reason only –  DATA. You can spin that any way you want, but at the end of the day, they are not attacking your systems to see how you configured your workflow or how efficiently you processed your orders. They could care less. They are looking for the golden nuggets of info... (more)