SOA Registry and SOA Management Combined: The Ideal Governance Solution

Previous tutorials have discussed service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the values around SOA in the utility industry. This SOA registry and SOA management tutorial will look at the changes that occur as organizations initially move toward SOA.

As IT moves from a "silo-ed" business environment -- where every application is entirely separate from others -- toward an environment in which information is shared across application silos, where applications are more integrated, the dynamics of the company's operations begin to change as shown in the diagram below.

The dynamics of the organization's IT infrastructure and operations change as shared services span vertical silos; the organization can benefit in this situation by introducing a SOA registry coupled with SOA management.

SOA Registry Technology and the Need for Visibility

In a SOA environment, IT migrates from a world in which individual teams were once entirely responsible for their own silo-ed areas of functionality -- to one in which no single project team can be wholly responsible for an application from end-to-end, so to speak. There can no longer be a single project, nor a single application, featuring end-to-end business process visibility.

SOA Registry: Coping with Silos

Moreover, the processes that actually run and define the business begin -- as the SOA strategy integrates vertical applications and data -- to span the different silos. This change has important implications. One is that policies will now need to span all of the silos: policies and compliance requirements can no longer be defined and restricted to vertical silos. Because, as services begin to span silos, any one of them, without network-wide policy enforcement, has the potential to impact the network and the organization at large.

Why You Need a SOA Registry and SOA Management

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No Visibility Means No Business Context: Living Without SOA Registry and Management Technology

Looking at a SOA environment using a traditional management package, one would see a set of disconnected silos of applications. And when the organization's information systems are organized into silos, viewing it in silos makes sense.

Viewing a SOA environment with a traditional management package: business context is lost. Combination of a SOA registry and SOA management restores visibility and context.

Viewing a SOA environment with a traditional management package: business context is lost. Combination of a SOA registry and SOA management restores visibility and context.

But, in the case of the new, connected SOA world, seeing a set of disconnected silos means that IT loses the context in which its environment is functioning. IT loses visibility into when problems are occurring and what the root causes of those problems are. IT loses the business context around services because any given shared service can be potentially used for multiple purposes -- by many consuming applications and users. Because of these realities, IT cannot, with a traditional management package, tell how urgent or important a problem is -- or how, fundamentally, it is impacting the business. A SOA registry, combined with SOA management, can solve this problem. The next tutorial will explore other SOA issues in depth and describe solutions to resolve these issues.

For More Information

Discover how a combined SOA registry/SOA management solution can make your organization more secure, agile and competitive: download the free webinar, Optimizing the SOA Lifecycle from Design Time to Runtime with Comprehensive Governance