The Internet of Things (IoT) has been generating significant hype, and the recent acquisition of Nest by Google further fanned the flames of anticipation as consumers began to imagine real-life applications. But there have also been timely reminders of the security and privacy issues associated with the growing number of connected devices (such as the Snapchat hack and the publicized Tesla vulnerabilities). In these early stages, the Internet of Things is far from secure. In this contributed article, Mark O'Neill, vice president of innovation at Axway, will provide a timely reminder of the risks presented by the emerging IoT, what enterprise IT has done in the past to overcome similar issues, and how security approaches need to change to accommodate today's level of connectivity.

This is part 3 of a six-part series of articles on N-Layer design. In this installment I'll dig deeper into the Validation Framework I introduced in part 2 and show you how to write your own validation behavior in your business entities and how to set up your application for localization so you can target users in multiple languages.

This installment ties together emergent-design concepts from previous Evolutionary architecture and emergent design articles with a case study that shows how to discover, harvest, and leverage unexpected design elements in code. Once you understand how to identify design elements, you can use that knowledge to improve your code's design. Emergent design allows you to discover aspects of your code that you could never anticipate yet have become important parts of your code base.

To better understand how SOA patterns can be applied to Windows Azure deployments, we walk you through a scenario in which a bank moves its services to the cloud.

Most complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are mixed-criticality systems that have to be resilient against software design faults, hardware failures, and physical hazards under software control. This article reviews useful design principles and architecture patterns for the development of such systems.

How do you find hidden design in aging code bases? This article discusses two important patterns for code structure: composed method and single level of abstraction. Applying these principles to your code allows you to find reusable assets that remained hidden before, with the further benefit of letting you abstract existing code into harvested frameworks.

Building on the Software as a Service (Saas) momentum, distributed computing is evolving towards a model where cloud-based infrastructure becomes a key player, to the level of having a new breed of companies deploying the entirety of their assets to the cloud. Is this reasonable? Only time will tell. In this article, we will take an enthusiastic yet pragmatic look at the cloud opportunities. In particular, we will propose a model for better deciding what should be pushed to the cloud and what should be kept in-house, explore a few examples of cloud-based infrastructure, and discuss the architectural trade-offs resulting from that usage.

This article discusses why people are pursuing SOA, whether SOA is dead, what SOA Governance is, the relationship to SOA itself, how it differs from management, and how SOA differs from integration.

Managing complex applications and workloads in the cloud requires timely infrastructure reconfiguration automation. Application-centric management — in which your management efforts are focused on controlling all required resources as a unified system and the parameters for all runtime services as a single system definition — can provide an alternative, but equally effective, way to keep the performance level of your cloud at its best. This article presents a definition of application-centric-style management, the three key steps to achieving it, and demonstrates how to automate the deployment of a two-tier J2EE application in the IBM® Cloud. You get to practice action creation, hooking actions to events, and event handling.

Thinking of distributed embedded systems (DES)—let alone the more general area of embedded computing—as a unified topic is difficult. Nevertheless, it is a vastly important topic and potentially represents a revolution in information technology (IT). DES is driven by the increasing capabilities and ever-declining costs of computing and communications devices, resulting in networked systems of embedded computers whose functional components are nearly invisible to end users. Systems have the potential to alter radically the way in which people interact with their environment by linking a range of devices and sensors that will allow information to be collected, shared, and processed in unprecedented ways.