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Enterprise Application Integration
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Business to Business Automation is about sending messages between computer systems owned or run by different parties. There may be many ways of delivering a message, from email, file transfer (FTP), common web protocols (HTTP) or special custom methods (even 'sneaker LAN' - put on a floppy disk and delivered by hand to the other party). There may also be many routes to deliver the message, sometimes through other 3rd parties, even simultaneously. And sometimes the same message may even arrive more than once. In delivering a message you may be concerned that 3rd parties might read it. To ensure confidentiality therefore encryption may be needed to render it unreadable without the appropriate key. Also, how can the party receiving the message be sure that it really did originate from you, or the message purporting to be from them is really so and that it wasn't altered in some way along its journey? Digital Signing is another mechanism to ensure the authenticity and that neither party can repudiate that the message they sent was from them. The handling of encryption and signing involves use of cryptographic keys, the management of which may themselves become a difficult task. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) can simplify this task by recognising in common other 3rd parties that can be trusted. These are known as Certifying Authorities (CA). Once a message from one party has been delivered to the other party, and the receiver isn't prevented from reading it (decrypted), and can trust who it came from (authenticated), can they read it? Maybe not as it can depend on the format and the vocabulary used. If both parties aren't able to speak the same language then the message will be of little value. Once a message, decrypted and authenticated, in an appropriate vocabulary has arrived, some real processing may take place. Converting that message into something useful for existing applications is the next step to take place. And when the existing application has processed it, almost invariably a message will need to be returned to the originator of the first message. So the whole process repeats itself in reverse. With these messages going back and forth between systems, each representing an activity from among a plethora of potential activities, the co-ordination of which message corresponds to which introduces a new need for choreography or orchestration. "Who does what when." Vanguard Computer Services can help you get through all these steps and more to ensure reliable, accurate and easy integration with your systems. We can decipher the acronyms and assist in the development and management of a plan of implementation.
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