Breaking News - Security:

Reactivity Debuts Secure Deployment System For XML Web Services

Reactivity Inc unveiled the Reactivity Secure Deployment System, a suite of next-generation products that enables enterprises to secure, provision and operate XML and Web services more efficiently and effectively, and accelerate their time-to-market. The first system of its kind to provide structured workflows to coordinate the delegation of security policy creation, approval and deployment throughout an organization, the Reactivity System overcomes the hurdles to Web services deployment by addressing organizational as well as technical issues to help enterprises realize the promise of Web services.

The Reactivity Gateway 2400 series (formerly the Reactivity XML Firewall) incorporates the new 4.0 release of Reactivity's XML Operating System (XOS) with hundreds of performance and feature enhancements. The new Reactivity Gateway 2460 is the first product of its kind to offer Tarari hardware XML content processing to virtually eliminate the impact of message size on performance. The Reactivity Manager, now a stand-alone product, delivers unprecedented improvements in the creation, approval and deployment of enterprise Web services security policies, automating workflows to help coordinate activities across organizational boundaries within the enterprise. These new offerings join the recently announced desktop Reactivity Gateway-D appliance and Reactivity Gatekeeper server-side plug-in to establish the Reactivity Secure Deployment System.

"Today's announcement is a significant milestone in Reactivity's history, marking our transition to offering a full product suite that addresses not only security but also the broader technical and organizational issues our customers face in the deployment of secure XML and Web services," said Glenn Osaka, CEO and president of Reactivity. "Expanding from our core as a proven leader in Web services security, we have introduced our unique workflow capabilities to more fully address the rapid provisioning of heterogeneous connections, and added features to simplify operations so they can be more easily handled by existing staff."

In real-world deployments, the Reactivity Secure Deployment System has already clearly demonstrated its value, enabling Aeroplan to go from proof-of-concept to full production in 38 days. The Reactivity solution also enabled a major financial services firm to slash the time required to implement new Web services connections from 99 days to less than one day, reduced salaried support costs from $40,000 to $4000 per month and enabled it to realize over a 10x annual increase in Web services revenue.

"Many enterprises have discovered that dealing with myriad security, provisioning and operational issues coherently can be a difficult challenge when building a Web service," said Ray Wagner, vice president and research director, Gartner. "An enterprise-wide infrastructure that can address organizational as well as technical issues could offer significant value to enterprises deploying multiple, complex Web services."

"Reactivity clearly understands and simplifies provisioning, securing and sustaining Web services -- facilitating the deployment and success of Thomson Prometric's SOA. Reactivity's addition of its robust and manageable cross-functional workflow accelerates our time to create new services, connections and policies, while ensuring the privacy of our customer's information and the integrity of our information," said Christopher Crowhurst, vice president and principal architect at Thomson Learning. "The Reactivity System has had a significant impact on streamlining our Web services development efforts, providing the dedicated, secure deployment infrastructure we need to deliver significant revenues and differentiation through Web services."

Enterprise Policy Management

The Reactivity Manager redefines how enterprises achieve effective XML and Web services security policies, providing the policy services, diagnostic and monitoring capabilities and operations tools enterprises need to speed deployment and reduce errors.

Reactivity Manager makes it easy to define policies and implement a structured policy workflow to delegate policy responsibilities and coordinate efforts throughout the enterprise. Users are assigned to groups and can view and change only those security policies owned by the group, allowing multiple entities within an organization to control their own security policies while sharing a common Reactivity Gateway infrastructure. Centralized administrators can review and approve changes made by multiple groups, and allow each of those groups to deploy their policy to the Reactivity Gateway independently of the other groups' policies.

Reactivity Manager also facilitates policy migration and policy rollback, and provides detailed searchable and policy-aware logs and log analysis tools to help speed problem diagnosis. User dashboards, alerts and extensive reporting capabilities make it easy to constantly monitor activity. Reactivity Manager features simple, one-click security policy deployment, aggregating group policies, optimizing them to maximize security and throughput and pushing them to all the Reactivity Gateways that enforce it. Secure, real-time policy updates and system updates are achieved without service interruption.

Wire-Speed Performance

The new 2400 series Reactivity Gateway has been enhanced with a number of hardware and software improvements to boost performance in order to anticipate the growing volume of XML Web services transactions of our customers. Both production configurations of the Reactivity Gateway, the 2450 and 2460, include the new nCipher nForce(TM) 1600, a FIPS 140-2 Level-3 certified hardware security module combining cryptographic key security with SSL and cryptographic acceleration supporting up to 1600 new SSL connections per second. The Reactivity Gateway 2460 features the Tarari RAX Content Processor, the industry's first in silicon implementation of Random Access XML. Co-developed with Reactivity, the Tarari RAX-CP performs complex XML tasks up to 200 times faster than software-only solutions, allowing complex XML documents analysis to be completed in near-zero CPU time.

The Reactivity Gateway XOS operating system software has been streamlined to optimize performance, allowing more concurrent connections without sacrificing overall performance to any single consumer, resulting in significantly reduced latency under heavy loads and the ability to process larger messages at higher volumes with a single appliance. Improvements of up to 400 percent can be realized, depending on message size.