In this quickly growing digital economy, where we have an increasing demand on things like security, cloud and mobility, IBM MQ has been growing to meet those demands. To pick two of the three topics, MQ v8 can deliver secure cloud integration straight of the box.
It is important to know what type of cloud are we’re really talking about. Are you talking about moving all of your services into the cloud – even your virtual desktops? Or are you talking about a hybrid cloud where with a mix of cloud computing supplementing your own services? Or are you talking about a private cloud, where you’ll have segments of internal computing services totally isolated from general services. There are different considerations for each scenario.
Regardless of the type of cloud-computing services you’re using, you still need to integrate these services, and you really need to ensure that your integration has security, data integrity and the capability of sending messages once-only with assured delivery. Cloud can’t provide that. MQ can and does. And it does if out of the box with several recent enhancements to ensure secure integration.
With the digital economy, we’re all sharing all this data, including personal data, banking and health data. We need to keep this data secure when it’s being shared, and control who has access to it. Then of course there’s the large compliance piece we need to meet. How does MQ meet all these demands? The answer is authentication, and MQ’s solution is still the same as being asked for ID of proof at the post office when you go to pick up a package. MQ v8 has been enhanced to support full user authentication right out of the box. No more custom exits and plugins.
For distributed platforms, you have local OS authentication, or you can actually go to centralized data. For z/OS you’re still focused on local authentication.
And this next point is important: MQ for quite some time has supported certificate authentication of applications connected to MQ services. But this always meant that the public MQ key had to be shared with everyone. MQ now has been enhanced to support the use of multiple certificates for authentication, securing of connections and encryption using separate key pairs. MQ still support SSL and TLS, although there are strong recommendations for switching from SSL to TLS based on the POODLE vulnerability.
(Image from mrdorkesq)