Nickolaos Kavantzas

Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the right direction to start delivering on this promise. SOAs (service-oriented architectures) promise to enable businesses to align their business processes to customer needs, and optimize them to improve customer responsiveness and drive efficiency. A process-oriented realization of SOAs is necessary to deliver on this promise. The process-oriented model is based on an SOA component model augmented with an underlying formal model in which business processes are expressed through orchestration and choreography. This model blends the bottom-up framework of SOA with a top-down, process-centric view. By simplifying the set of activities that are part of the life cycle of business processes, we'll outline how this approach is... (more)

Best Practices for Securing Your SOA: A Holistic Approach

Service-Oriented Architectures offer a number of potential benefits: They can provide new opportunities to connect enterprises with customers, partners, and suppliers; improve efficiency through greater reuse of services across the enterprise; and offer greater flexibility by breaking down IT silos. But these benefits make security more critical than ever. Why? Services are highly distributed, multi-owner, deployed to heterogeneous platforms, and often accessible across departments and enterprises - and this creates major security issues for developers, architects, and security a... (more)