SOA in Action Blog

There's a lot riding on SOA management. "Used correctly, SOA management can facilitate the cost effective deployment of new business relationships, the efficient use of existing IT investments and can measure the real value to the organization of SOA itself," observes fellow ebizQ blogger Ronan Bradley.

But how do you achieve such expansive management? Traditionally, managing technology has meant the monitoring of connectivity and associated quality of service, Ronan points out. However, as organizations move to SOA, things get more complex. Management needs to include information and business processes built on top of the technology levels of the middleware stack.

Ronan identifies key aspects of SOA management:

Registry: "As the core artifacts in SOA are of course the service definitions, it is essential that these are published with all the additional descriptions and definitions of modes of use required for successful utilization by consumers."

Identity: There are dedicated Identity management products for handling the maintenance and distribution of identities from inside and outside of the enterprise, and these must in turn integrate into the SOA management framework.

Lifecycle management: "In an environment with an expectation of change and the devolution of responsibility to make those changes, lifecycle management becomes crucial: How are new services rolled out? How are old services retired? How do you track the consumers of a given version of a given service?"

Security: "Supporting multiple security models reflecting the differing security needs within a department, across departments and out to suppliers and clients."

Service level agreements: SLAs are "important for both the supplier and consumer of the service: How much processing power is being used? How long does my request take to be completed?" Technology-driven metrics need to move beyond fault detection and "translate into the business domain."

Beyond technical infrastructure, SOA management has the capability to "provide a flexible infrastructure to ease the deployment of a new business relationship which can require everything from new identities, new security models to new business processes," Ronan states.