Web services provide a way to allow efficient communication between disparate services. For years, enterprises have struggled to find reliable, cost-effective ways to integrate and automate critical processes between different application packages. Web services technology has the potential to answer an enterprise's needs, providing the ability to integrate different systems and application types regardless of platform, operating system, or location.

The key to the success of Web services is the use of a common data exchange standard such as XML. Through the use of this common language, enterprises can create reusable application components (Web services) that can be linked together to cost-effectively create distributed enterprise applications with minimal development efforts.

Vendors continue to design the framework and development environments necessary to build Web services. However, the projected adoption rate is tremendous. According to estimates from Gartner, Web services will represent the "dominant mode of deployment for new application solutions for Fortune 2000 companies" by 2004.

Because Web services could involve millions of users, the need to provide security, high availability, and reliability for these services is critical. To enable Web services to flourish and reduce the high costs and complexity associated with additional application servers, companies must look to network technologies for help. Businesses must consider highly intelligent network products that can quickly process any application or Web service, ensuring quick response times, reliable sessions, adaptive scalability, and application-level security, all through a single network device. Additionally, the products they choose must be flexible to easily handle future applications and protocols while protecting and improving the performance of their application investments. Key challenges include:

Increasing network security: When designing their Web services infrastructure, organizations are challenged with finding traditional network devices and tools that increase reliability and provide an extra layer of security. Network devices need flexible, comprehensive, and secure feature sets to increase control over network traffic and protect the organization from existing and future attacks.

Enterprises should look for products that provide enterprises the ability to switch, persist, and filter any type of Web service based upon content encapsulated in the header or payload of a packet. The resulting benefits of this capability are extremely significant, allowing businesses to support the complex security and high availability requirements of today's Web services - making them simpler to implement and maintain while dramatically increasing operational efficiencies and cost savings.

Published Dec. 3, 2003 — Reads 8,469
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About Jeff Browning
As Product Manager for F5 Networks, Jeff is responsible for driving the product and marketing strategy for F5's iControl API and Software Development Kit. With over 10 years of software industry experience, Jeff's extensive background in Web services, Enterprise Portals, and Software Development tools at leading companies like Microsoft and DataChannel helps bridge the gap between networking technologies and Web services applications for better performing, scalable, and secure enterprise solutions