Enterprise architecture protects computers

Enterprise architecture must be a key part of the strategy used to protect government computers and networks from cyber-attacks, said Ron Ross, a National Institute of Standards and Technology senior computer scientist, at the Government Technology Research Alliance symposium held in Hershey, Pennsylvania, reports FCW.com.

Ross said he first thought security would cure all enterprise architecture challenges, but he quickly learned that idea is flawed.

“Enterprise architecture, I believe, is going to drive the ultimate success of protecting our critical infrastructures,” Ross said.

Web-oriented architecture (WOA) has proven itself as a viable approach to building large-scale, worldwide Web services, according to .Net Developer's Journal.

WOA is a combination of established technologies with the goal of keeping things as simple as possible while remaining flexible. A WOA interface can be used from any Web-enabled programming language, including the command line or browser; the interface can be learned by example and observation, and it can be easily extended without requiring central oversight.

WOA is emerging as an alternative architectural style that is better suited to an environment where innovation must occur without central decision-making, messages must remain interoperable over long periods of time, and the cost of scaling must remain low.

In this new global reality of companies rushing to exploit the opportunities of SOA, clouds and other distributed models of computing, determined outsiders and insiders may seek to exploit vulnerabilities, says Network World.

Consequently, the pervasiveness of these technologies marks a fundamental change in how organisations should approach the accompanying security challenges - especially the top three challenges identified by many organisations as being fundamentally important in the next year.

These three new trends relate to identity, information security and application security.