Common Practices in Distributed Application Infrastructure

Businesses commonly build their distributed application infrastructure on top of an extranet spanning across multiple offices and business partners. These individual offices or business partners typically have their own favorite application platforms. Specific business logic consisting of proprietary information is carried out by legacy applications which are usually secured within protected local networks. Only selected application interfaces are exposed as distributed component services for remote applications to access via an extranet. The required infrastructure needs not only to accommodate the distributed component services but also to facilitate the data flows among the applications securely and reliably.

What are the Challenges?

Challenges businesses have been facing in building a distributed application infrastructure include:

• Disparate technology platforms used in different offices or by business partners


• High TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) building and managing private networks


• High TCO going for custom solutions that use proprietary technologies


• Limited security and reliability using the Internet as data communication backbone


• Confusions in numerous proposed security and interoperability standards


• Businesses lack technical resources with required expertise