Summa

There’s plenty of talk about security and SOA (or should I just say services now?), but the vast majority seems to cover only the issues of authentication and identity management, and neglects the equally important problem of authorization (*1). Although I can’t claim to be a security expert, in a series of posts, I’d like to share some of my thoughts and experiences on implementing authorization in the world of service-oriented architectures.

In this first post, I’d like to take a quick trip through some of the basic terms and definitions of authorization, laying the conceptual groundwork for the later posts. Ok, let’s get started!

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Instead of giving the obligatory dictionary definition, I’ll just say it like this: a consultant is someone with some wisdom (hopefully), that is asked for advice and guidance. More specifically, companies employ IT consultants to help them solve their business problems with technology. Some consultants are specialists; they have a narrow field of expertise, and are brought in to work with one specific technology. Other consultants (Summa consultants, for example) tend to be generalists; they’ve worked on many different problems at many different companies, using varying technologies as needs dictate.

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Planning for application modernization projects frequently stalls because decision makers are frozen in their tracks by uncertainty around the wide range of options and approaches to replacing, improving, rehab’ing or reusing a legacy system. Build versus buy; go fast versus go slow; good versus cheap; user impact; technologies to use (and not use); level of reuse of legacy “stuff”; historical data access; data quality and IT skills are just a few of the considerations that boggle architecture decisions and confound planners. This article outlines some of the metaphors and patterns that have been useful to break the gridlock.

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As is often the beginning of most anything we do, this story starts with necessity! Unfortunately for me, the necessity was caused by my own screw-up: I had to restore my wife’s computer from a backup and instead of giving files their original modified timestamp, I accidentally chose to set the timestamp to the current time! Well, now she lets me know how difficult it is to arrange our digital pictures into their appropriate months when the files are misdated!

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