Scott Morrison

Earlier today CNET published an interview with Marc Andreessen, in which the Netscape founder and influential VC outlines his personal vision for where tech is heading in the near future. His new tagline, from a piece he wrote for the New York Times, is “software is eating the world”, a blunt reference to how software increasingly appears out of nowhere to utterly consume a traditional practice or business model—be this in commerce, the social realm, or just about everywhere. Andreessen asserts that this affect will only accelerate in the future because of the explosion we are experiencing in mobile computing: Most of the people in the world still don’t have a personal computer, whereas in three to five years, most people in the world will have a smartphone…. If you’ve got a smartphone, then I can build a business in any domain or category and serve you as a custome... (more)

Clouds on a Plane: VMware’s Micro Cloud Foundry Brings PaaS to My Laptop

On the eve of this week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas, VMware announced that Micro Cloud Foundry is finally available for general distribution. This new offering is a completely self-contained instantiation of the company’s Cloud Foundry PaaS solution, which I wrote about earlier this spring. Micro Cloud Foundry comes packaged as a virtual machine, easily distributable on a USB key (as they proved at today’s session on this topic at VMworld), or as a quick download. The distribution is designed to run locally on your laptop without any external dependencies. This allows devel... (more)

Cloud Security Alliance Introduces The Security, Trust and Assurance Registry

As a vendor of security products, I see a lot of Requests for Proposal (RFPs). More often than not these consist of an Excel spreadsheet with dozens—sometimes even hundreds—of questions ranging from how our products address business concerns to security minutia that only a high-geek can understand. RFPs are a lot of work for any vendor to respond to, but they are an important part of the selling process and we always take them seriously. RFPs are also a tremendous amount of work for the customer to prepare, so it’s not surprising that they vary greatly in sophistication. I’ve al... (more)

Nothing Succeeds Like Success: Analysts Place Layer 7 On Top Once Again

We’ve had a good Fall here at Layer 7. Last month, Gartner declared that Layer 7 is a leader in its 2011 Magic Quadrant (MQ) for SOA Governance Technologies. To be placed by Gartner in the Leaders Quadrant is a formal recognition of a company’s excellence in its vision and its ability to execute. We’ve achieved this honour with Gartner before (it was the last time they evaluated the SOA Governance space, back in 2009); but this year the firm raised the bar considerably by emphasizing the greater scope of SOA governance, including the overall life cycle of policy and services. We’... (more)

How to Secure REST and JSON

Here at Layer 7 we get asked a lot about our support for REST. We actually have a lot to offer to secure, monitor and manage REST-style transactions. The truth is, although we really like SOAP and XML here at Layer 7, we also really like REST and alternative data encapsulations like JSON. We use both REST and JSON all the time in our own development. Suppose you have a REST-based service that you would like to publish to the world, but you are concerned about access control, confidentiality, integrity, and the risk from incoming threats. We have an answer for this: SecureSpan Gate... (more)