SOA Controls

Why and When SOA Controls Are Necessary

SOA controls are necessary because Web services or a service-oriented architecture (SOA) frequently represents business activity directly. As a result, their performance and reliability are strategic to the business. In fact, as the number of services grows and services are shared and reused or one of several conditions occur, an SOA will need a strong and deep SOA and Web services management solution.

These conditions include formal SLA commitments, direct external use of company services, complex inter-team dependencies that require visibility into services, an SOA implementation with multiple layers worked on by different teams, and mission-critical or widely shared SOA services.

Major SOA Controls

In addition to advanced capabilities for SOA monitoring and management and SOA security and compliance, major SOA controls that are critical to SOA ROI include:

  • Service lifecycle integration. SOA management can begin during SOA development and integrate with design-time SOA governance. The SOA registry and repository should become a centralized place to hold all kinds of policies: those that are enforced at runtime as well as policies for service development and deployment. Once services are in production, an advanced SOA management solution can supply the registry/repository with information on actual SOA performance and usage. This information can be used to find rogue services and understand service dependencies for SOA change management.
  • SOA policy management. Companies examining SOA management solutions should look for unified SOA policy management - the ability to examine all policies across the SOA lifecycle. They should also consider where and how policy is defined, managed, deployed, and enforced. Solutions that separate policies from the applications they manage are more configurable and easier to manage, eliminating re-coding of the application every time a policy or application is changed.
  • Service versioning and version resolution. As companies increasingly share and reuse services, problems can arise when services are updated. All users of a service may not be able to upgrade at once—giving rise to multiple versions of a service in production at once. An advanced SOA management solution may provide service versioning to help migrate or get a coherent view of the simultaneously running versions.
  • SOA business-level monitoring and management. Because SOA activity represents business activity, companies need business process visibility and SOA controls beyond just technical performance monitoring and management. Some advanced SOA management solution can provide business monitoring, that is, present the executing service activity in a business context.
  • Mediation and integration. Advanced SOA management solutions may provide mediation and integration between different protocols, eliminating the necessity of buying another solution just to perform some minor functions.

Actional can provide business process visibility into operations, for example, information on individual customers and statistics on the top ten customers in call times, call volumes, and sales value.

Actional can provide business process visibility into operations, for example, information on individual customers and customer groups, and SOA controls for aligning IT with business goals.

Advanced Controls for SOA Management

Your SOA represents business activity. Learn from Randy Heffner, Forrester Vice President, and Dan Foody, Actional Vice President, what SOA management controls are necessary in the Webinar "SOA and Web Services Management: Why Planning Now Is Vital for Success.

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Controlling Your SOA with Progress Actional Products

Progress® Actional® products encompass a wide range of advanced SOA controls required for SOA success. They can:

  • Detect, interrupt, and report on rogue services as well as provide feedback to the registry-repository on actual service usage and dependencies. This runtime information is important for change management.
  • Decouple policies from services, allowing centralized policy definition and management and active policy enforcement locally on the distributed network where appropriate. This separation allows policies and services to be changed independently and puts control of specialized policies in the hands of experts.
  • Route services to the correct version and between different versions, allowing incremental migration to new versions over time.
  • Provide business-level monitoring and management—tying  business performance metrics (for example, on customers, customer groups, regions, etc.) to the underlying SOA network and offering SOA controls for dynamic continuous service optimization, for example, to give priority service to key customers.
  • Mediate incompatible communication protocols.

For More Information on Key SOA Controls

Download "SOA and Web Services Management: Why Planning Now Is Critical to Success," a Webinar featuring Forrester Vice President Randy Heffner and Actional Vice President Dan Foody.