Organizations are flocking to service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments in growing numbers. And given the potential benefits of the technology, who can blame them? But experts say it’s important for IT and business executives to understand and address the management challenges of a move to SOA. To ignore these is to invite trouble.
The market for SOA offerings continues to grow. AMR Research estimates that worldwide SOA spending will increase from $20.9 billion in 2007 to $51.9 billion by 2012. The rapid growth of the market is the result of SOA’s spread across and within companies, according to AMR.
The potential benefits of SOA are compelling. A service-based architecture can enable organizations to develop new applications and revise existing ones more quickly and at less cost. As a result, they can be more agile and respond more quickly to changing market conditions.
SOA helps speed up development processes in several ways. It allows easier integration, so organizations can efficiently connect disparate applications by developing standardized services. SOA also promotes increased reuse of application components that are exposed as SOA services, and that can help reduce development time. Organizations can rapidly deploy new processes or alter existing ones by using services as building blocks. 数据挖掘研究院
Whether organizations get the most out of SOA depends largely on how well they manage SOA implementations, however.
“The CIO has to understand that SOA is not a project, but a business strategy. Therefore, it’s not something that IT can undertake in isolation,” says Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, and author of SOA for Dummies.
In the second edition of her book, which is being released this fall, Hurwitz includes more than 20 case studies of successful SOA implementations. “The commonality between all of them is the focus on the business issues,” she says.
All of the CIOs and other IT executives interviewed for the book were successful because they partnered with business leaders and focused on business processes, creating common business services, Hurwitz says. “They also viewed SOA as a journey and were investing both in time and money over many years,” she says. “No one we talked to started by building a bunch of services to see if anyone wanted to use them.” 数据挖掘论坛
How can managers effectively troubleshoot SOA-based application performance when services are virtualized and distributed across many hardware systems? “Management of virtualized environments is a big issue and one that companies are starting to deal with,” Hurwitz says. “Service management, in general, and for SOA in particular is going to be one of the most important trends and focuses over the next couple of years. Virtualization management, including security, is an important issue that’s still evolving.”
Organizations that successfully implement a SOA strategy need to have information security as a major focus, Hurwitz says. Identity management is a critical component of the SOA security strategy.
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