Web Services
In today’s global marketplace, the Internet is no longer just about email and Web sites. The Net has become the critical conduit powering a growing list of revenue-generating e-business activities—from e-commerce and e-supply chain management to online marketplaces and collaboration. Web Services leverage the ubiquity of the Internet to link applications, systems, and resources within and among enterprises to enable exciting, new business processes and relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers around the world.
While early Internet applications helped individuals communicate with each other, Web Services are focused on helping applications communicate with each other. In the past, a purchasing agent might send a purchase order to a supplier via email. In the age of Web Services, a company’s purchasing application communicates via the Internet directly with a supplier’s warehousing application to check price and availability, submitting the purchase order to the supplier’s shipping application—automatically, with little or no human intervention.
The benefits of Web Services are not limited to interactions between different companies.
Business units within the same enterprise often use very different processing environments. Each policy domain (that is, scope of security policy enforcement) is likely to be managed differently and be under the control of different organizations. What makes Web Services so interesting is that they provide interoperability across security policy domains.
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