White Papers from Foliage Software Systems are your source for information on the latest technology developments that affect the security industry.
Author: Dan O’Connor, Technical Director Vince Dovydaitis, Technical Director
Security vendors are feeling the pressure to deliver integrated enterprise security solutions to their customer base. Driving this trend are the end customers, who are looking for improved, integrated threat response coupled with lower total cost of ownership. Suppliers that offer only stove-piped point solutions will lose market share and will eventually be left behind. This paper prescribes a proven approach with well-defined steps for developing a security integration strategy that is aligned with your specific business drivers and delivers early business value.
Author: Timothy Bowe, Co-CEO
Security equipment manufactures are increasingly being pressured to supply technically complex, integrated systems in response to the industry’s rapid consolidation. Organizations seeking to fulfill an integrated position in the market are more and more utilizing merger and acquisition strategies to achieve increased capabilities and product line expansion. But how do organizations quickly and successfully integrate multiple entities resulting from technology-based acquisitions? This paper investigates the acquisition integration puzzle from the perspective of R&D. “R&D Efficiency in a Chaotic Security Industry” examines the factors and processes that support aligning of business and technology strategies to extract the most market leverage and top-line growth from combined or restructured product lines.
Author: Jim Roman, Senior Business Development Manager, Security; Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace, Defense and Security
As terrorists, rogue nations and criminals become more sophisticated, customers in the security market demand rapid response from security manufacturers in building next-generation equipment. Driven by constantly shifting specifications, affordability considerations, and shortened development schedules, trade-off decisions may unknowingly jeopardize market acceptance and in turn, hinder a company’s ability to achieve sustainable market share. This brief explores the impact of following a market-driven philosophy and describes a method of identifying and propagating key value drivers throughout the development cycle to ensure that critical end user requirements are met.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace, Defense, and Security Division; Jim Roman, Senior Business Development Manager, Security
Have you ever authorized a software project only to wind up with something unexpected upon the program’s completion? Does your software development team ever lose sight of the business goals? Once you turn your engineers loose on a software project do you feel that you're no longer in the loop? In the security marketplace, software development increasingly accounts for product development cost overruns, schedule woes, and corporate credibility problems—ultimately affecting survival. What can you do about it? Our latest brief entitled “It’s Your Fault Too” illustrates the critical importance of executive involvement. Four pages from now, you will understand how you can maintain control of your product development efforts.
Author: Karl Aeder, Principal Software Engineer
This paper discusses the challenges associated with developing real-time control software, and makes both architecture and development process recommendations that can limit the risks associated with these challenges. A short case study is provided at the end of the document to show how these approaches were applied to a real world situation that resulted in commercial success.
Author: Charlie Alfred, Technical Director
This paper introduces two essential concepts; value models and architecture strategy; concepts that are missing from many development processes. The creation of well-defined value models provides direction that improves the quality of tradeoff decisions, especially in systems that are deployed to many users in various settings. The existence of a clearly-stated architecture strategy provides a coherent high-level direction for the system, in the same way that the United States Constitution does for its nation. Finally, this paper will show how these two concepts can be integrated effectively with waterfall, spiral, or agile methods.
Author: Charlie Alfred, Technical Director; Tim Bowe, Co-CEO
This paper addresses the technical issues associated with formulating an architecture strategy for a family of software-intensive products. It also describes some of the important obstacles that are faced when formulating an architecture, and discusses some techniques to help overcome these obstacles.
Author: Erik Westlund, Principal Software Architect
This presentation looks at the set of protocols supported by WS-Security (Kerberos, SAML, etc.), and reviews their bindings, drawbacks, and restrictions. It also discusses the higher-level abstraction layer that aids in forming multiple implementations into a Federated Identity Management capability.
Author: Vince Dovydaitis, Engineering Director; Denis Piliptchouk, Principal Engineer
This presentation looks at the ways to forge an integration between Identity Management solutions from Liberty Alliance and WS-Security groups, hidden obstacles along the way, and the resulting design and implementation trade-offs and limitations.
