Distributed Systems, Distributed Security, Enterprise Control

Component technology, which closely groups data and the business logic that makes use of the data, is having a dramatic impact on the business computing landscape. Developments in the field of distributed component computing allow cooperating components to reside in different machines, networks, or even enterprises. These developments enable businesses to enhance and reuse installed applications rapidly, representing new power to tap the immense value of legacy resources. As a result, many organizations are migrating from traditional, single-layer client/server applications to multitiered application architectures.

Distributed component technology provides the foundation for next-generation e-commerce applications because it offers so much versatility. Distributed component components that encapsulate code and data can reside anywhere on the network. Client software need only know about the component’s interface. How the component is implemented and where it is running is transparent to the invoking application. Transparency and reusability give distributed component computing environments great power, but they present new challenges for information security. These challenges require new ways of thinking and new tools.