Centralized policy management and runtime governance for SOA

The ever escalating increase in XML traffic is resulting in multiple instances of XML Gateways across the network; inside the DMZ, at the data-center for acceleration and application offload to relieve key processing bottlenecks, and in front of key applications to identify service usage and behavior. To overcome potential operational control issues a single policy management point is recommended for centralized control.

Architecture
As seen below, Vordel Policy Director addresses the need for centralized policy management across a distributed network of XML Gateways and XML Firewalls. Enterprises can control a distributed network of XML Gateways and XML Firewalls from a single location. By using the Vordel Policy Studio to create modular reusable policies organizations can cluster, version, reuse and migrate policies to meet high level security, offloading and monitoring requirements across their entire SOA.

Key Features

Avoid the "island mentality"
Vordel Policy Director ensures that Vordel's customers do not have to manage a group of isolated policy "islands" each in an individual XML Gateway, but instead they are managed together.

Centralized SOA Policy Creation
Policies contain specific assertions about operational attributes such as authentication and authorization, encryption and signatures, routing and transformations and versioning. The powerful Policcy Studio contained within Vordel Policy Director allows for policies to be created and maintained through an intuitive drag and drop interface that is the most advanced design available on the market today.

• Quickly and painlessly create sophisticated policies to manage XML traffic
• Significantly more powerful and easier to use than competing wizard-based products
• No complicated configuration of lines of XML or XSLT code

Lifecycle Policy Management
Policies managed by Vordel Policy Director are readily transferable across multiple Vordel XML Gateways and XML Firewalls. This allows for policies to be developed in a testing environment, next proofed in a staging environment which is designed to replicate production systems, prior to going into production. Policies can be easily migrated between testing XML Gateways, staging machines, and production XML Gateway appliances.

Policy rollback
Policies may be rolled back in order to revert to previous versions of policies. This is a safeguard for policy updates. It also allows for systems to be restored to policy versions which were in place at a certain date, for testing or auditing purposes.

Role based access to policies
Administrators are assigned differential access to policies, including Read, Write, and Update permissions.

Centralized Logging
Metrics on Web Services usage across multiple XML Gateways and XML Firewalls are centrally stored by Vordel Policy Director. This centralized logging allows reports to be generated by the VordelReporter product. This allows all Application Networking activity to be viewed together in centralized Web-based reports.

Policy Storage Flexibility
Vordel Policy Director's policies may be stored in LDAP directories, Relational (SQL) Databases, XML Databases, or simply on the file system as XML files.

Fast provisioning of XML Networking infrastructure
Vordel Policy Director's policy management allows new instances of XML Gateways and XML Firewalls to be created and deployed quickly. This is particularly relevant for VMWare-based deployments of software-based gateways.

Vordel Director datasheet