Securing the Grid and securing Web services ... one in the same?

We're all familiar with the cliche that the "fortress" approach to enterprise security is dead -- you can't just put things behind a firewall and compete in today's business world. You need practical ways to let the good guys in, and keep the bad guys out. This applies doubly to Grid environments, whose whole reason for existence is coordinated resource sharing across wide areas.

Developers realized in the very early days that without proper security guarantees, Grid computing would stall out of the gates, so this is has been one of the heaviest concentration areas to date.

There's an interesting tutorial today on IBM developerWorks about delegation of rights in Grid environments. What's particularly noteworthy for mainstream enterprise IT folks is that the Globus Toolkit (the most widely used open source middleware for Grid computing) over time has assimilated many of the key components of the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF).

For subject matter like security, which is critical yet can be quite daunting, this utilization of accepted standards puts a familiar face on otherwise complex tasks. This tutorial is a great example of how Grid computing is actually well within reach for the skill set of the average IT pro working with web services today.