Thursday, November 03, 2011

Oracle Web Service Manager vs Oracle Enterprise Gateway

Oracle Web Service Manager is an integral part of the Oracle SOA suite and it allows us to implement security declaratively; without any coding from the developer. Security policies can be enforced at run-time using WSM agents or WSM gateways.
There is another product called "Oracle Enterprise Gateway" that has features that overlap with OWSM - hence this results in lot of confusion.

So, lets understand the concepts one by one. A WSM agent is a component that is installed with the endpoint service. So it provides the 'last-mile' security (last security layer). Now OWSM also a gateway component where security policies can be employed in a central location. A gateway can also perform functions that an agent cannot do, such as message routing, transformations, and failover. OWSM also has an extension for OSB, that allows us to use OWSM policies at the OSB (ESB) layer. These capabilities would suffice the requirements of most intranet SOA infrastructures.

Oracle positions the Oracle Enterprise Gateway as the first line of defence ("perimiter security") when SOA services are exposed to the outside world. This is the equivalent of a DMZ firewall. So it looks like Oracle Enteprise Gateway is a more expansive product that can do everything that OWSM does, plus all the bells and whistles.

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