Configuration Guides › SOA Agent for IBM WebSphere Guide › SOA Agent for IBM WebSphere Introduction › SOA Agent for IBM WebSphere Overview

SOA Agent for IBM WebSphere Overview

The SOA Agent for IBM WebSphere resides in a WebSphere Application Server, enabling you to protect WebSphere-hosted JAX-RPC web service resources.

The SOA Agent for IBM WebSphere intercepts all SOAP messages sent over HTTP or HTTPS transport to JAX-RPC web services deployed on the Websphere Application Server. The SOA Agent then communicates with the Policy Server to authenticate and authorize the message sender and, upon successful authentication and authorization, passes the SOAP message on to the addressed web service.

A high-level overview of the SOA Agent for IBM WebSphere Server architecture is shown in the following figure.

The SOA Agent for IBM WebSphere provides the following features:

• SOA Security Manager Integration with the J2EE platform
• Fine-grained access control of JAX-RPC web service resources
• Support for bi-directional SOA Security Manager/SiteMinder and WebSphere single sign-on (SSO)
• Support for WebSphere clustering

The SOA Agent additionally supports:

• J2EE RunAs identity
• Multi-byte character usernames
• User mapping to support environments in which WebSphere and SOA Security Manager are not configured to use the same user store
• Centralized and dynamic agent configurations
• Caching of resource protection decisions and authentication and authorization decisions
• Logging
• Authorization auditing