Security in business processes

By John McIntosh 19 Aug 2003 | IT-Director.com , special to SearchWebServices.com

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Market Analysis

Security in business processes
A while ago I hypothesised about who might supply your security. A good example of this is SeeBeyond who have a suit of products based around connecting trading partners.

A core component of their offering the SeeBeyond e*Xchange(TM) Partner Manager, a Web-based trading partner management solution for automating and securely managing business partner relationships for real-time interaction between the enterprise and its partners, suppliers, and customers. This is built on the e*Gate(TM) Integrator platform that provides seamless integration with business partners as well as internal application.

Automates interactions with trading partners by enveloping, validating, and generating required responses for leading eBusiness protocols such as EDI and XML-based messages.

One of the attractions of e*Xchange is that it can guarantee that sensitive company information is kept private and unaltered, as well as ensuring business transactions are conducted with known and trusted parties. It does this with it own internal non-repudiation mechanism to prove the validity of these transactions.

SeeBeyond's Web-based Transaction Auditing addresses the types of controls we have in the paper world Receipts, invoices, and signed contracts are utilized to resolve disputes and prove that transactions actually took place. The online world has the same requirements. SeeBeyond's e*Xchange provides a complete audit trail for reporting and analysis of all B2B transactions and relationships.

e*Xchange provides a public key infrastructure (PKI X.509) with an S/MIME and SSL-based security solution for ensuring data privacy, data integrity, trading partner authorization, and transaction non-repudiation.

The e*Xchange Partner Repository acts as a repository for trading partner profile information - such as contact information, B2B protocols, message types, and security - as well as message information, which enables transaction auditing and non-repudiation.

All the logic to envelop outbound transactions, validate inbound and outbound transactions, and automatically generate acknowledgements, negative acknowledgements, responses, and control messages in executed within the e*Xchange Engine.

In environments with high transaction volume, the rules-based protocol engine that allows fine-tuning of individual trading partner parameters may be distributed across the system architecture to share the processing workload and eliminate bottlenecks. This sits well as part of a federated trust architecture.

The attractiveness of SeeBeyond's offering is further enhanced by its out-the-box support for leading eBusiness protocols including RosettaNet 1.1/2.0, X12, EDIFACT, CIDX, BizTalk Framework, HIPAA and technical standards such as S/MIME, HTTPS, SSL, and TLS. Encryption and authentication services include DES, MD5, RC2, SHA-1, 3-DES and X.509 certificate processing.

SeeBeyond's offering is an excellent example of how security is moving towards full integration in the business process layer.

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