ALES 3.0- What's New?

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Bill Dettelback's Blog | February 7, 2008   2:16 PM | Comments (0)

BEA recently released AquaLogic Enterprise Security 3.0, and I thought I'd just highlight some things we're excited about:

1. Revamped, Streamlined GUI

ALES 3.0 introduces a brand new UI experience for policy management. This is a big deal because it is a customizable tool that really simplifies the process of managing users, attributes, roles, resources and policies. Going forward, we'll be using this framework for all new UI features in the product.

2. Configurable Attribute Retrievers

So many of our customers depend upon external data to drive their policies. For example, policies might need to look at an LDAP attribute for a user or query a database to get a particular value that affects a policy outcome. ALES has always had the ability to retrieve data during policy execution, however prior to 3.0 we required you hand-roll some code. Now in 3.0 we support several standards-based data sources Out Of The Box- you just tell us where to get the data and it's done. You can pull attributes from LDAP, RDBMS, or Service Data Objects (SDO).

3. New Security Service Modules (SSMs)

We just introduced two new SSMs that were requested directly from customers:

Oracle RDBMS

The Oracle SSM leverages the Virtual Private Database (or FGAC) feature of Oracle 9.x and 10.x such that the SSM intercepts SQL statements on the fly.  You can then write policies that add "where" clauses dynamically to the query before it is executed.

WebSphere App Server 

The WebSphere SSM plugs into the 6.1 App Server (just like our WebLogic SSM) and lets you do in-memory authorization decisions inside your J2EE application (EJBs, JSP, JMS).

4. Simpler Configuration

ALES 3.0 provides a new ConfigTool utility that completely automates the task of creating an SSM configuration.  This is especially welcome for customers who need to enable a WebLogic domain.  If you ever hand-configured a WebLogic Server domain to use the ALES providers, you'll appreciate using this tool.  Basically you just provide the parameters you want (domain name, ssm configuration id, authentication directory, etc.) and ConfigTool does the rest.

5. More Programmatic Support

We now ship with a Beehive Control which allows you to make ALES call-outs from inside any Apache Beehive or WebLogic Workshop enabled application (e.g. WLI or a PageFlow).  This is very useful if you want to do fine grained entitlements inside, say, a PageFlow portlet in WebLogic Portal.

We're also shipping an ALBPM 6.0 Component for doing the same thing inside a BPM process.  In other words, you can now use ALES to make security/routing decisions on behalf of an executing business process. 

6. Expanded platform support

ALES 3.0 covers the widest set of runtimes now for administration and enforcement.  We now run ALES Admin Server on WebSphere, and secure WebLogic Integration 9.2.  We have even expanded our supported databases for Admin.

ALES 3.0 is a big release- and I'll be looking at more of these features in detail over the upcoming posts.

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