SOA Environment: Organizational Controls

Runtime governance is where Actional products fit into the SOA environment: where the user is empowered to focus on what's actually happening in production.

There are three key roles for runtime governance:

• To detect and control rogue services: A safety net for the production environment. Allows the organization to make sure that if services slip through the cracks, getting deployed without following compliance measures, these services will be caught when they enter production.
• To automate policy enforcement: It's important to be able to take policy creation and enforcement away from developers of services themselves and make it a centralized function. The more this function is pushed back on service developers -- the more they are made to follow the rulebooks of policies in addition to developing their service logic --the less likely the services will be compliant when they are rolled out.
• To enable policies to change: Change is very important; policies will change after they've been rolled out into the production environment, and this presents a moving target in terms of challenges: including having to re-do or modify services after they've been deployed.

The SOA Environment without Runtime Governance

Consider a SOA environment that has a few services deployed, as well as a few consumers of those services -- with this situation reflected in the registry. A previous SOA example describing rogue Web services elaborated on the problems that can arise without runtime governance:

• Performance problems due to rogue services using services that users weren't aware of.
• A service consumer outside of IT's scope of awareness could be sharing sensitive customer data in the open because the appropriate policies aren't being applied.
• Within the internal production environment, one can get unexpected re-use of services from known consumers and providers.

The SOA Environment with Actional Runtime Governance

Actional runtime governance enables the organization to regain control over what's happening in the production SOA environment. IT will actually have insight into all of the service consumers and providers such that it is possible, for example, to control sensitive customer data and lock it down and encrypt it so that it's no longer shared in the open. IT thus becomes aware of the different consumer and provider relationships that really exist in the runtime environment. In addition, IT has the power to share this data with a registry, so now the repository will actually be synchronized with the runtime environment.

For More Information

Discover the latest secrets for managing your SOA; learn how to stay rogue-service-free! Download the Actional white paper, SOA Primer: Comprehensive Runtime Governance from Actional