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Breaking News - Security:

BEA Partners With Industry-Leading Security Vendors

BEA Systems Inc, a leading application infrastructure software company, announced that industry-leading security partners including Symantec Corp, VeriSign Inc, Business Layers, Thor Technologies Inc and WaveSet Technologies Inc plan to support BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security. BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security is a powerful and unique application security infrastructure designed to help enterprises strengthen application security, enable secure information access and improve IT efficiency. BEA's partners are establishing a "security ecosystem" designed to help customers easily integrate market-leading security solutions with BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security, and ensure flexibility and choice, as well as protection of current and future IT investments.

Leveraging its application infrastructure expertise within the innovative BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1, BEA is offering an application security infrastructure solution that can break down barriers to application security challenges with BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security. BEA's patented, distributed architecture and service-oriented approach is designed to allow for centralized security policy visibility and control without sacrificing enterprise performance, scalability and reliability. Also, BEA's standards-based framework can easily integrate into diverse IT environments as well as existing third party security solutions, which can remove the need for costly and time-consuming hard-coding by developers, and can place the power of application security into the hands of security administrators.

"Application security is a critical issue for enterprises today," said George Kassabgi, vice president and general manager of application security infrastructure at BEA Systems. "However, organizations are spending too much time and money on integrating point security solutions into their applications and infrastructure. By bringing its industry leadership in standards and integration, BEA can deliver an open, interoperable, standards-based application security infrastructure solution that is designed to allow our security partners to help customers strengthen application security, reduce costs and speed time to value."

Enterprise Identity Management And User Provisioning

Critical to application security, identity profile information is used in the execution of most security services to ensure the appropriate people have access to the right information resources. For example, when a new employee joins a company, a user provisioning solution such as those offered by BEA partners Business Layers, Thor Technologies Inc and WaveSet Technologies Inc can abstract this new user's profile data —- including identity, role(s) and credential information —- and provision this user profile data to identity and policy stores that BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security can leverage. This can enable WebLogic Enterprise Security to have access to the latest user profile data when executing its security services, such as authentication, role mapping and authorization.

Authentication

The keystone of a robust application security infrastructure is authentication –- a process that verifies the identity of a user. Through its open, interoperable solution, BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security can facilitate integration of third party authentication methods and can enable organizations to implement the appropriate authentication method for their specific needs.

"Enterprises are facing a dilemma today in that their operations need to be more open and secure," said Mark Griffiths, vice president of marketing for VeriSign Inc. "Having a robust IT security infrastructure in place is essential as more and more critical functions are operated via the Internet. We are proud to continue our relationship with BEA by combining our authentication offerings with BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security. Together, we can provide the tools designed to allow our customers to reach their ultimate business objectives."

Auditing

Auditing is another essential component of application-level security, as it can provide organizations with the data necessary to identify user access policy breaches, including insider intrusion attempts. Symantec and BEA Systems can work together to provide a solution designed to allow organizations to capture and report previously unavailable data from various applications and to enable enterprises to identify and respond rapidly to security breaches.

"Symantec and BEA Systems share the same vision for offering comprehensive security solutions to our customers," said Rob Clyde, vice president and chief technology officer at Symantec. "The integration between Symantec Enterprise Security Architecture, a standards-based interoperability framework, and BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security can be the foundation for providing customers with a holistic view of their network and user security posture."