Trustway Vordel Gateway appliance - high performance, standards support, and Common Criteria at EAL-4

Vordel and Bull have teamed up for the Trustway Vordel Gateway appliance, which features EAL-4 Common Criteria certification, fast performance, and support for key SOA and security standards:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bull-and-vordel-combine-forces-to-offer-security-and-performance-for-soa-2010-03-30

Podcast interview with Vordel's CEO, Vic Morris, about Cloud Computing

Vordel's CEO, Vic Morris, recently was interviewed by Jessica Ann Mola at ebizQ for a podcast. The questions which Vic addresses are:

* Why is cloud computing such a compelling model and which verticals are adopting cloud computing most?
* What are the major challenges hindering the adoption of cloud computing by large enterprises?
* How can companies overcome their concerns to ensure they benefit from cloud computing?
* What is the role of SOA in cloud?
* Is there a space for specialist vendors in a market dominated by giants such as Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Microsoft, etc.?

Check out the podcast here

Vordel in SiliconRepublic.com

Vordel is profiled in SiliconRepublic.com this month where John Kennedy analyzes Vordel's Cloud Service Broker: http://siliconrepublic.com/news/article/15669/cio/vordel-working-with-dell-amazon-to-secure-biz-cloud

Salesforce Data Point

6+ out of 10 salesforce transactions are performed through the API.
http://twitter.com/edwk/status/10206575123

See also:
- Monitoring the Salesforce API and
- Receiving Salesforce API outage information on a phone ]

[ Hat-tip to William Vambenepe ]

How to create a public and private key pair using SOAPbox and export as PKCS#12

SOAPbox has a lot of useful features, such as testing REST Web Services like Microsoft's Bing, doing a vulnerability assessment of a Web Service, and driving command-line stress testing of a Web Service.

But did you know that you can use it to generate X.5o9 certificates and their corresponding private keys? For this purpose, it's a lot easier than using the OpenSSL command-line options. With SOAPbox, the whole process is GUI-driven. Here's how you do it:

First, under the "Security" menu item, choose "View Certificates":



Now his "Create" in the bottom-right, and you see this page:



Now you can insert the certificate attributes by pressing on the "Edit" button near the top-right of the "Configure Certificate and Private Key" dialog:



If you want to also create a private key to correspond to your new certificate, press on "Sign Certificate". You can choose to self-sign the certificate, or you can sign it with an existing CA key (which is then listed as the "Issuer" of your new certificate).

Once you've created your certificate (and, if you signed it, your private key) then you can export this as a PKCS#12 key file or a CRT file in order to import it into another application. You can also, of course, use it for requests you're sending from SOAPbox.

Grab your free copy of SOAPbox here...

RSA Conference Bingo

Last week I only had a brief time to wander the RSA Conference floor, but in that brief time I saw a good 25% of Bruce Schneier's RSA Bingo Card...

The big news at the Oscars

Steve Jobs in attendance!