Interoperability in the digital era

In a previous blog post, we highlighted why digital is at the top of the business agenda and why businesses are making the switch to digital. Rolling out a digital business strategy allows organizations to remain hyper-competitive in today’s digital age.

As more businesses embrace the digital age, organizations need to properly implement a business strategy. This needs to support the rapidly changing interaction landscape through the implementation and application of new digital business technologies. Organizations can gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. After all, instead of falling behind, why wouldn’t these organizations embrace the (digital) change?

However…

However, there are regulations within each industry that have been implemented. They need to ensure that the customer has certain protections and that no company becomes a monopoly. AS4 is an applicability statement implemented using Web services and SOAP-based specification. This is a modern incarnation of previous applicability statements that were implemented using SMTP (AS1), HTTP (AS2) and FTP (AS3). AS4 represents the state-of-the-art for secure data exchange and interoperability with a simple mechanism of acknowledgment, non-repudiation of data origin, and non-repudiation of receipt—the central requirements for secure data exchange, and one of the steps organizations need to take to embrace digital business.

Four ways AS4 can help standardize organizations’ digital era business:

1. Helps businesses comply with government and industry guidelines: AS4 helps organizations simplify Web-service adoption for B2B interactions and provides new functionality with the latest security algorithm, enabling organizations to implement specific features they require. Additionally, AS4 paves the way for international interoperability in the future.
2. Extends the reach of internal SOA architecture to include customers and partners: Enables organizations to share their own internal services and applications beyond the firewall and allow all parties to view and participate in digital business processes in unprecedented ways.
3. Ensures interoperability for cloud-to-cloud information exchange: Aids in the exchange of data between clouds through a safe and secure pathway.
4. Enables partners with asynchronous “pull” data exchange patterns not available with AS2: AS4 ensures businesses around the world, of any size, can integrate the push data to partners with AS2 and vice versa.

The question remains, “Is your industry or customer requiring you to meet the newAS4 requirements?” To meet ever-changing business requirements, Axway has developed Axway B2Bi –a future-proof B2B gateway for AS4 compliance. Axway B2Bi is part of the Axway 5 Suite, and it provides businesses with the capabilities to establish connections and manage information flows between internal applications and B2B community within the cloud and hybrid environments.