MAS (Mobile Application Services) is a new product released by CA available at http://mas.ca.com. This release enables mobile apps to be developed faster, and offers robust out of the box features. Written in Objective-C and available for both Android and iOS, MAS becomes a great solution to add to your mobile strategy.
I created my first mobile app for iOS utilizing Swift, and MAS Frameworks for a Healthcare demo application. MAS and MAG allowed me to extend into Single Sign On, Local Storage, along with encryption that is offered – specifically AES. (i.e. AES-256, HMAC+SHA256, and PBKDF2 are offered) After the demo presentation at CA World a lot of ideas came to add in features that are also enabled by the CA Mobile API Gateway (CA MAG) such as adding in Proximity Login, Social Media, and even One Time Password generation for extra security.
All documentation and SDK’s to get started are available at: CA MAS – all of these great out of box features are ready to be integrated, and all your developers have to do is invoke a feature!
- Messaging
- Provides the ability for users to subscribe to a topic, and messages can be sent to all users. MQTT enables this features, and security is provided by the Mobile API Gateway. This is a great feature for use cases ranging from traffic, schedule changes, weather, or even sports scores – you could even tie this into server status API to alert administrators of issues!
- User Management
- Have you had issues exposing your address book to mobile applications? CA provides this feature, in company with MAG to make this easier for you. Utilizing SCIM from the Gateway the communication between domains is made easier.
- Publishing/Subscribing
- MAS enables your enterprise to simplify IoT with this feature. Setup a MQTT broker such as Mosquito locally, or grab a hosted solution such as CloudMQTT and pub/sub becomes easy. As soon as changes happen, your app can have the latest data with MQTT broker pub and sub. Along with the transmission protocol, having two way SSL to secure your connection puts security at ease.
- Adhoc Groups
- This feature gives you’re the ability to create membership groups with MAS. Utilizing SCIM 2.0, you can create specific groups to send out updates to selected users. Along with providing the ability to access users or groups from other identity providers (i.e LDAP, MSAD).
- Local Storage
- Local storage offers one of my favorite features, which is encryption out of the box. As I mentioned above AES-256 is available by simply invoking the MAS Framework to secure a file. For the demo app I created I am encrypting PDF’s that are generated by Swift code, and sent via email. There can be times that local storage is the only option, but there is also the feature for cloud storage – below!
- Private Cloud Storage
- Cloud storage gives you the ability to share your data across your enterprise to many devices or users. Security, and storage out of the box is provided with this feature. Sharing the same security, plus more with the use of Mobile API Gateway. See here how to get more out of your MAG and MAS setup.
