Web Services to the Rescue
Web services offered a way out of the custom-built merry go round by providing a common, reusable framework that was far easier to customize for each client’s needs than modifying a Web application. Once familiar with building Web services, Ogilvy decided to tackle their next biggest issue: LDAP exports and imports. “We used the Web services framework to abstract access to our entire directory space,” explained Andreu. “Prior to that, the other side of the world had to be in tune with our schema… We bought ourselves a lot of flexibility, or loose coupling if you will, of the systems.”
So now Ogilvy had a flexible Web services-based system that could authorize users before granting them access to the shared functionality. The only problem was that once those users were on the network, they had access to everything – they just didn’t know it because the end points and formats weren’t published. ‘Security through obscurity’ is little better than no security at all, so Ogilvy began the search for a way to implement end point authentication.