Best Practices for Securely Exposing Network Assets

Next Generation Communications Blog

Best Practices for Securely Exposing Network Assets

By David Sims

To continue competing in the marketplace, a recent post from Alcatel-Lucent contends, service providers "must increase their influence on the content delivery value chain by adding unique value to it."
Service providers have network assets that offer a quantifiable value to third parties looking to provide consumers services, the post says, adding that "these assets can be used to monetize the massive streams of content and application services that traverse the network."
And the first step, naturally, according to Alcatel-Lucent officials, is "to figure out which assets can be used to attract those who design or deliver applications, video streams, and other multimedia services."
But security is a big issue here. "Securely exposing control assets to content providers and third-party application developers enables service providers to offer differentiated services to multimedia companies and application developer communities," the post notes.
The Alcatel-Lucent Application Enablement vision, company officials say, helps service providers "identify their service capabilities, then expose and package them in a consistent and formalized way, while retaining access control."
The company's Application Exposure Suite provides a layer of protection and controlled access, company officials say, "allowing service providers to identify and expose capabilities required to deliver multimedia content, securely via open application program interface constructs, while protecting mission-critical assets."
They also offer a Developer Platform that facilitates rapid market entry for service providers and enables frictionless collaboration and support of technical and commercial interactions with application developers, and a Multi-Screen Foundation, which provides capabilities removing much of the complexity behind multimedia service provisioning.
Using open SOAP/XML interfaces, then, Alcatel-Lucent officials say there are some services which can be exposed to Web developers:
·         The Multi-screen Head-end, which allows operators to extend asset delivery to any terminal type.
·         Federated identity, which brings subscriber data together into one place.
·         Converged payment, which facilitates e-commerce and flexible payment mechanisms.


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