Securely connects distributed apps and services across public cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. Utilizing Infrastructure as Code, App Connect provisions resources and maintain uniform policies across multiple sites.
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IBM DataPower Gateway
Score 9.0 out of 10
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The IBM DataPower Gateway is a security and integration platform.
I thought F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect worked great to bridge the gap between our gcp environment and on prem. We were lacking in cloud funtionality for native load balancers but XC really connected the dots. We would most likely need a hybrid environment until the irules functionality improves for a few of our apps but most could be migrated over the XC.
WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
Ease of use - standing up a new site took very little time, less then an hour.
Connecting the dots - the ease at standing up a load balancer and advertising it on CEs was simple and straight forward. Once you get familiar with the field layout it's very comparable to BIG-IP
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
More of a unified experience as Gartner released their latest sort of sassy trends. A lot of consumers are looking at a more unified experience and that's the sort of compilation of both management and data planes into a single things like single UI, easier management experience for the corporations.
The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.
From what we have been able to test load/responsiveness is quick and when we've tested out reporting and troubleshooting modules they have pulled the correct information in quick timeframes. We haven't been able to test out any software integration with Splunk of other software on our system since we are still in early POC stages but from what we've been told we should be able to implement that in our environment
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
