Security of your IT applications and data. A hot topic that continues to be in the headlines. Not only from the standpoint of security issues and breaches, but also from the growing regulations that mandate standards for data access and storage.

Today's presentation from Prolifics' Mike Hastie illustrated how some Prolifics customers have implemented security solutions. Using Tivoli Access Manager to provide single sign-on capabilities and Tivoli Identity Manager to easily manage access to your networks and applications. Using WebSphere DataPower, SOA/XML appliances known for performing message transformation at wirespeed, to also provide encryption/decryption, message authentication and policy management of Web services.

Whatever security solution you implement, the main lesson that I got from today's presentation is to avoid doing security as an afterthought. This is even more important in an SOA context where services are meant to be easily accessed and reused. Security needs to be part of the design of your applications and services as well as the deployment. Which is where tomorrow's topic -- SOA Monitoring: Making it 24x7 -- also plays a part. Hope you'll join us!