Day: April 10, 2018

ICYMI: This year’s Big Data Paris 2018 Congress and Expo was last month and I was more than lucky enough to represent SnapLogic there with a presentation. Happy to say that the winter weather didn’t deter me or the other 15,000-plus attendees from talking big data. Now in its 7th year, this year’s conference focused on how big data is disrupting business processes more than ever, along with the trends toward the democratization of data and its business uses. As big data ROI becomes more measurable, it’s become central to large organizations and their missions around fraud detection, customer satisfaction, anticipating outages or business opportunities, improving operational efficiencies, and “name your concern.” Now more than ever, big data requires investment and thoughtful leadership across any large organization.

During my presentation, “Overcoming the challenge of multiple data frameworks in a multiple cloud environment,” I talked about how a major hurdle for today’s technology leaders is the need to be able to manage several data frameworks that reside in multiple clouds all with varying standards to due multiple vendor solutions. To overcome this challenge and glean insights from these data lakes, enterprise leaders will turn and are turning to iPaaS and managed services for big data integration. https://goo.gl/ceUsDj #DataIntegration #ML

As an enterprise integration platform and backend, API-oriented, application server, Zato 3.0 ships with Single Sign-On and User Management APIs whose many exciting features are detailed in this article.

* No need for maintaining one’s own user database, everything is API-based – user creation, updates, logging in, logging out, checking access, creating sessions, validating sessions, search, there is an API call for everything.
* Strong encryption and safe data storage assist in achieving compliance with regulations such as HIPAA or EU GDPR.
* APIs exist for both REST and Python calls which means that everything is also available to user-based services communicating through additional protocols, such as AMQP, WebSockets, ZeroMQ, IBM MQ, or any other that Zato supports.
* Comes with a built-in workflow for user signup, including user approval and welcome messages – just fill in the email templates.
* Personally Identifiable Information (PII) can be optionally encrypted and decrypted without any programming needed.
* Both users and their sessions can be given arbitrary key/value tags, also optionally encrypted and decrypted on the fly.
* Users can be required to log in from selected applications only.
* Users can be required to access APIs from selected IP addresses only.
* Passwords are always hashed (PBKDF2) and, by default, encrypted as well (Fernet).
* PBKDF2 parameters can be easily fine-tuned in each environment separately.
* Configurable warnings of an approaching password expiry.
* Password strength enforcement, including length checks and blacklisting of the most commonly used ones.
* Audit log keeps track of who accesses personal information and for what purpose.
* Clearly defined roles – regular users and admins (super-users).
* Convenient command line tools for scripted management of user accounts, including typical tasks such as resetting a user’s password or locking and unlocking an account.
* Extensive documentation covering the functionality, including dozens of REST and Python examples.

The functionality is a major addition to Zato in version 3.0 and can be expected to expand with each new release, including support for additional authentication methods and interoperability with existing authentication protocols, yet in its initial form, it can already handle a lot of use-cases and processes. https://goo.gl/4s64a4 #DataIntegration #ML

ICYMI: With the introduction of Mule 4, there are many new features available to use. One among them is “Try Scope.” If you have a Java background, you will be familiar with this term. In Java, a try block is used to enclose the code which has the possibility of being an exception, so that it can be handled without breaking the whole code.

Similarly, this feature is now enabled in Mule 4. Instead of creating a new flow to create specific error handling protocols for each component, we can put our component in the try block. A try scope wraps one or more event processors, then catches and handles any exceptions that might be thrown by any of these enclosed event processors. The behavior is as if you extracted those enclosed event components into a separate flow with its own error handling strategy, but inline, without having to actually define a new flow. https://goo.gl/d8uBLv #DataIntegration #ML