SOA to Legacy

The ability to put XML Web Services interfaces in front of legacy systems such as mainframes databases is potentially very valuable. However, mainframe and database administrators are understandably reluctant to expose the "crown jewels" of legacy assets for consumption by Web Services without an appropriate management solution in place.

Vordel's Legacy Connector solution enables policies to be applied to Web Services interfaces into legacy environments. This provides Vordels' customers with the protection and confidence to expose legacy systems via Web Services to partners, employees and customers.

Using Vordel's legacy adapters, Vordel's customers can safely unlock their legacy assets via Web Services interfaces.

The benefits of this to Vordel's customers include

Offload of XML processing from the mainframe
Vordel's products allow processor-intensive tasks, such as XML Signature processing and XSLT transformation, to be applied in front of the mainframe, rather than running on the mainframe itself.

Reduce migration time and costs
Vordel's integration appliances and integration software mean that legacy exposure projects can be greatly accelerated, since policies are applied in front of the legacy system and without any requirement for code to be written.

No need for cross-platform skills
Neither Web Service application developers nor mainframe developers are required to develop cross-platform skills as the Vordel solution creates a separation between the protected legacy system and the Web Services being securely exposed.

Key points to consider when exposing legacy assets to an SOA world include

Keep an audit trail of all accesses
Vordel's products log all access to Web Services interfaces. For Vordel's appliances, these logs can be written directly on the appliance itself, or to external data stores.

Protect mainframe assets in an SOA world
Web Services and represent a potential attack path into legacy systems. Vordel's products block this attack path.

Avoid "baked in" policies
It is tempting for developers to write code which controls Web Services based access to mainframe resources. However, this approach means that there is no way to administrators to view policies, change policies (without changing code), or keep a log of the policies which are in force. Vordel's policies are expressed as declarative XML policy files, which can be archived, logged, and viewed in Vordel's Management Console.