To hear the vendors tell it, security problems are becoming worse with every passing week.  To be fair: monitoring companies often back this up.  So having the right security measures should be a top priority at every business, and a new guide discusses the selection of XML security appliances.

Credit goes to Techworld for publishing the piece.  It names transport-level security, application security, XML threat protection, application access management, single sign-on support, and message content inspection and validation as six key features to look at.  After all, you don’t want to get distracted by bells and whistles when the main attractions are broken or lacking.

Then, to make sure your new purchase won’t necessitate a whole other bundle of expenditures, consider the matter of integration with your IT infrastructure.  Hardware should be inspected, and look at issues of extensibility, scalability, and performance, too, as these will affect how the security appliance fits in.

Scrutinizing the appliance’s support for security standards may sound like checking that a car consumes gasoline - this is a security appliance, after all - yet it’s the sort of thing you might as well think about before spending as much as $70,000 (and some cars take diesel or odder stuff like electricity these days).

Shop safely.  Or, if you’re on the other end of the transaction, know that these are some good selling points to bring up with customers.

Over at SEOmoz, Duncan Morris has come up with an informative post that provides the users with the pros and cons of using XML Sitemaps.

Sitemaps.org defines sitemap as, “Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.”

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