Client Showcase: Insurer Wins with Centralized, Reliable and Secure ESB

At Prolifics, our commitment to client success is at the core of our business. Recently, we celebrated a successful solution "go-live" with one of our clients in New York. The solution highlights our team's expertise and technical skill across IBM software.

Our client is a large health insurer based in New York, servicing over 3 million people. Facing increasing challenges to maintain the disparate legacy technologies from the merged providers, the Company sought to integrate their systems under a centralized, reliable and secure enterprise service bus (ESB). Additionally, the Company wanted to move away from their traditional paper-based model by integrating a messaging framework into the new ESB that would enable faster, easier patient onboarding and care. They reached out to Prolifics to lead the project, wanting to leverage our strong ESB capabilities to build an optimal solution. Prolifics experts designed and installed an infrastructure architecture built on IBM Integration Bus (IIB), IBM Decision Server Rules and IBM DataPower to enable a robust ESB and integrated IBM Business Monitor and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Monitor (ITCAM) for Transactions to provide deeper monitoring and reporting capabilities, conducting testing throughout the effort to ensure optimal performance. The Prolifics team also developed a common rules framework to connect the disparate customer enrollment programs to various other internal systems. With the new ESB and rules engine in place, the Company can ensure consistent, secure sharing of customer enrollment information across the enterprise, improving efficiency and ultimately quality of care.

To learn more about Prolifics' integration solutions, visit: http://www.prolifics.com/soa-universal-connectivity

IBM Impact Session Preview: How PSCU implemented their Intelligence Platform through a SOA COE

Hear how PSCU implemented a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Center of Excellence (COE) - a linchpin solution that Prolifics has delivered to several customers. The COE ensures viability of PSCU business goals, especially as they relate to credit union connectivity and delivery of PSCU enhanced services such as credit/debit, banking, billpay, and PSCU mobility efforts through 2015.

PSCU worked with Prolifics and IBM to help deliver a seamless integration and runtime SOA governance aspects of PSCU's next-generation "intelligent platform" - a high-performance integration web service and connectivity platform with state-of-the-art integration, interoperability, security, and enterprise SOA governance capabilities. PSCU utilized IBM Integration Bus, IBM WebSphere DataPower Appliances, and IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository as part of this effort.

At IBM Impact, Prithvi Srinivasan will be hosting a subject on this topic with Prolifics' client PSCU. In this session, we will focus on how PSCU implemented their intelligence Platform with a Service Oriented Architecture Center of Excellence.

Session Abstract: 
Hear how PSCU implemented a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Center of Excellence (COE) - a linchpin solution that Prolifics has delivered to several customers. The COE ensures viability of PSCU business goals, especially as they relate to credit union connectivity and delivery of PSCU enhanced services such as credit/debit, banking, billpay, and PSCU mobility efforts through 2015. PSCU worked with Prolifics and IBM to help deliver a seamless integration and runtime SOA governance aspects of PSCU's next-generation "intelligent platform" - a high-performance integration web service and connectivity platform with state-of-the-art integration, interoperability, security, and enterprise SOA governance capabilities. PSCU utilized IBM Integration Bus, IBM WebSphere DataPower Appliances, and IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository as part of this effort.

Session Number: ICU-3358
Date/Time: Tuesday, April 29, 2014; 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM PDT
Location: Venetian-Marcello 4402

Add this session to your calendar!

To see a full list of Prolifics sessions, visit www.prolifics.com/impact-2014.htm.

Project Showcase - Prolifics Delivers IBM WebSphere DataPower Solution to Office Supplies Company

At IBM Impact, Prolifics co-hosted a session with our customer that showcased a recent IBM WebSphere DataPower solution. Learn more about how our experts were able to help our customer improve security and achieve full Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.

Prolifics' customer has been serving business customers for over 20 years, offering everything from office supplies to technology products to furniture and more. Dedicated to improving customer experiences, the Company embarked on a growth strategy in 2012 aimed at uniting the Web and brick and mortar stores through a corporate revamp. In order to keep personal information secure, company leaders also looked to improve security and policy enforcement for their website as a critical component of supporting this new strategy. Further, the Company was driven to comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS). With this in mind, the Company began to explore WebSphere DataPower to address their security concerns. Business and IT leaders were confident that DataPower would enable better, faster security and a higher level of compliance for their website. Seeking the expertise of a trusted partner, the Company engaged Prolifics to implement the solution, demonstrating DataPower's ability to help the meet compliance regulations far more quickly and efficiently than before. The appliance now offers front line defense for inbound and outbound internet traffic by acting as a Web facing application firewall and isolates information for further security.

To learn more about Prolifics' DataPower solutions, email solutions@prolifics.com or visit www.prolifics.com.

IBM developerWorks Article: Achieving PCI Compliance Using DataPower

PCI compliance is important to organizations dealing with cardholder data, and failing a PCI audit often results in heavy fines and damage to a company's brand reputation. WebSphere® DataPower provides a "drop-in" solution for customers facing PCI audits.

I recently published on article on IBM developerWorks which describes DataPower's capabilities for PCI compliance requirements, and how to position DataPower to achieve the maximum return on investment (ROI) in a short amount of time. To read the article, please click here: Achieving PCI Compliance Using WebSphere DataPower.

Prithvi Srinivasan is a Technology Manager at Prolifics and has extensive expertise in the IBM WebSphere suite of products. He has played a key role at several strategic clients by providing technical leadership. Prithvi has an extensive background in the design and development of SOA and Integration solutions, with a proven track record of consulting and architecting solutions for several industry verticals like Banking, Finance, Retail, Insurance, HealthCare and Technology.

Error Handling for Composite IBM DataPower Services

In general, when it comes to error handling i am a big believer in “Defense in Depth”. I prefer a multi-layered approach in which I try to account for the maximum possible conditions at each layer and eventually have a “catch all” net where I catch and process the errors that ‘slipped through the cracks’.

Let’s take a scenario where we have an orchestration service which is tied to a bunch of back-end proxy services. Each of the back-end proxies is tied to corresponding back-end application.

Below is the logical representation of a complex composite service on IBM DataPower:

Below is a description of the “Happy Path” i.e. the ideal scenario in which there is no error:

1. The incoming request is received by the ‘Orchestration Service’.
2. The orchestration service then makes a series of calls to the various back-end proxies. The request message for each call is dependent on the response messages from the previous calls.
3. The back-end proxy receives the message and in turn calls the back-end application.
4. The back-end application processes the message and replies with a response message.
5. The back-end DataPower proxy receives the response, reformats it and forwards it to the orchestration service.
6. The orchestration service receives the response and reformats it. It then either calls another back-end proxy, or forwards the reformatted message to the calling service.

Below is the description of handling error scenarios or the “unhappy path”.

Following are the various types of errors that we have to contend with:

1. Errors occurring in the back-end applications: These errors occur when the back-end application is able to successfully receive the request message from the DataPower proxy, but is unable to process it. This condition results in DataPower receiving a fault/error message from the back-end application
2. Errors occurring in the DataPower back-end proxy: These errors occur when the back-end DataPower proxy receives the request message successfully but is unable to process it. This results in the back-end DataPower proxy returning a fault/error message to the orchestration service.
3. Errors occurring in the DataPower orchestration service: These errors occur when the DataPower orchestration service receives the request message successfully but is unable to process it. This results in the DataPower orchestration service returning a fault/error message to the front-end calling service.

With that in mind, following is my preferred approach for complex composite DataPower services:

Errors occurring in the back-end applications:
The orchestration service checks if the response from the back-end proxy is a soap:fault, and it if is then it might decide to rollback any of the previous calls (like an adduser or a insert DB row) with another call(like deleteuser or delete DB row).

You can use the dp:url extension to do this:

These errors come back as soap:Fault messages with HTTP Response code ‘500 Fail’. Generate a custom error message which includes the following fields (at least):

• Error Code service variable
• Error Details service variable
• Timestamp service variable
• MsgId/UUID response payload

Now, convert the HTTP Response Code from ‘500 Fail’ to ‘200 OK’:

We convert the HTTP Response Code from 500 to200 so that the orchestration service treats the soap:fault message as a valid response instead of an error.

Errors occurring in the back-end DataPower Proxies: Such errors can be caught and processed by using a combination of the On-Error action with the Error Rule in the back-end proxy’s policy.

The error rule can be configured to generate a custom fault/error message with HTTP response Code set to “200 OK”.

Errors occurring in the Orchestration service: Again, such errors can be caught and processed by using a combination of the On-Error action with the Error Rule in the orchestration service’s policy. We send back the error message with a HTTP Response code of “500 Fail” to the front-end calling service.

Prithvi Srinivasan is a Technology Manager at Prolifics and has extensive expertise in the IBM WebSphere suite of products. He has played a key role at several strategic clients by providing technical leadership. Prithvi has an extensive background in the design and development of SOA and Integration solutions, with a proven track record of consulting and architecting solutions for several industry verticals like Banking, Finance, Retail, Insurance, HealthCare and Technology.

Considerations When Monitoring IBM DataPower

Effective and comprehensive monitoring of SOA environments that leverage the power, and complexity, of IBM DataPower appliances requires a multi-tiered approach. The various appliances deliver enhanced security, message transformation and routing and as key components of business critical applications, require close attention to insure high availability in all regards.

Coverage for DataPower appliances must include monitoring of services and resources. While the appliances expose a good number of metrics through SNMP MIBs, monitoring of the services they provide allows proactive alerting, to both Consumer and Provider communities. Operational teams focused on the health of the appliances must be informed of any issues related to the appliances themselves, such as power, cooling and hardware errors to proactively address any degradation in performance or availability.

Service monitoring of the appliances starts with engaging the application teams, Consumers and Providers, to establish the Service Level Agreement for the deployed services. Live traffic is then analyzed and factored against the requested response times and availability levels for all subscribed Services and Operations. This additional level of validation allows more comprehensive tuning and distribution of alerts, increasing service and operation availability and reducing Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR) in case of performance degradation.

DataPower appliances are most often monitored by a combination of agents, such as those supplied by IBM as part of the Tivoli Composite Application Management for SOA (ITCAM for SOA) Platforms package. ITCAM for SOA includes agents to monitor both Service execution and Resource Usage of the appliances, supplying invaluable data and insights to Operations, Application Support and Software Development teams. The Services and Resource agents are most often deployed on the same remote server and poll the appliances via SOMA and SNMP protocols. This architecture allows more centralized deployment and reduces license cost.

The monitoring team interfaces with a variety of teams, from Network Security, DataPower Support and Enterprise Architecture, SOA Governance and Application teams. Each operational team provides their own level of expertise to the architecture and deployment effort and their involvement helps insure a solid and well supported deployment.

Application teams in SOA environments are heavily invested in the success and availability of their services, so the overall effort will benefit from their early and frequent involvement. ITCAM for SOA provides unique insight into Consumer and Provider service response time and can assist in validation of the business logic and rules driving service architecture and deployment.

Dan Kern joined Prolifics as a Senior WebSphere Administrator and Performance Tuning expert. Over the past 7 years, he has held roles as a Technical Solution Director, Practice Director for the Automation and Systems Management area and now helps customers realize the full potential of their software investments as a Solution Architect. Dan is highly regarded in the Tivoli SAPM product and business areas and continues his focus on top quality solutions.