I have been asked a few times what SOA Governance means. SOA concepts have been around for quite a long time in the IT industry and is a significant step forward in aligning information technology with business goals.
When to use SOA:
If integration between diverse environments or dynamically changing environments is required.
If reusability is important.
When not to use SOA:
Not cost effective if you have a small number of applications.
If high performance is the deciding factor.
What is SOA governance?
SOA governance refers to the processes used to oversee and control the adoption and implementation of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in accordance with recognized practices, principles and government regulations.
What is the function of SOA governance?
Decision rights for the development, deployment, and management of new services.
Monitoring and reporting processes for capturing and communicating governance results. Because SOA applications are intrinsically fragmented, they introduce new governance challenges.
Why is governance needed?
To measure the effectiveness of SOA.
Enterprise IT needs to be flexible, extensible, responsible, resilient, and dynamically reconfigurable. This type of IT management and execution requires very efficient governance.
Investors put more faith behind companies that maintain a high standard of governance.
What does SOA governance consist of?
SOA governance consists of three major components: a registry, a policy and a testing procedure:
SOA registry is an evolving catalog of information about the available services in the SOA implementation. The registry allows businesses to efficiently discover and communicate with each other.
SOA policy is a set of behavioral restrictions intended to ensure that services remain consistent and do not conflict with each other. These constraints also ensure that good engineering practices, common-sense customer relations principles and government laws are followed. A specific person may be designated to grant occasional policy exceptions.
SOA testing is a comprehensive schedule of audits and performance-monitoring procedures intended to ensure that the entire SOA solution is efficient, cost-effective, secure and up-to-date.
What is needed?
A repository to store, catalog, and flexibly organize individual services.
Ability to report on key metrics.
Solution that integrates with existing SOA design.
How is compliance ensured?
It is the responsibility of the enterprise architects to see that new applications follow the enterprise IT architecture.
Establishing a center of excellence (CoE) for enterprise IT and SOA governance that would enable a shared resource and capability center to function as a resource pool as new business application needs arise.
Examples of governance:
Compliance to regulatory standards.
Compliance to standards that are industry-specific.
Service identification and categorization.
Service monitoring and tracking.
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