RSA: CA's 'Project SOA' tackles Web services security

IDG News Service - CA Inc. is readying new software designed to help secure and manage systems using Web services software.

The new product, expected by the middle of this year, will fuse the company's eTrust Transaction Minder and Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) software and will add new features to enhance XML security, said Toby Weiss, senior vice president and general manager of CA's Security Management business unit, in an interview Friday. Weiss is scheduled to speak Thursday at the RSA security conference in San Jose.

Code-named Project SOA, (service-oriented architecture), the product has been under development for the past nine months. CA will probably work with other companies to deliver it in a preconfigured hardware appliance, Weiss said. "We're definitely going to have a software version and we're working with some hardware partners now," he said.

CA has already integrated its Web services products with appliances from vendors such as Layer 7 Technologies Inc. and Forum Systems Inc.

With companies now beginning to bring Web services online, customers are looking for tools that can help them thwart potential attacks and also ensure that the Web services are used by only authorized users and applications, said Jason Bloomberg a senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, based in Baltimore.

"The Unicenter WSDM product is a reasonably mature product for Web services management, and Transaction Minder was gaining some traction in the Web services security space at the time that CA acquired Netegrity," Bloomberg said. "These are the two leading SOA products that CA offers, so it makes sense for them to be together."

CA completed its $400 million purchase of software vendor Netegrity in November 2004, and has been working since then to integrate the company's identity management products with the rest of its product line.

Project SOA fits into CA's broad plan to extend its management products to help IT managers set security policies, Weiss said. "Web services are coming on the scene in a major way. All companies are implementing them in some form or another. Even if they don't know it, they're buying software off the shelf that's implementing Web services."