What form will SOA take over the next few years? Predictions abound, but when the CTO of a major North American government talks about it, it's worth taking notice.
In this case, a CTO says SOA has matured, and is now rapidly evolving toward another industry-disrupting trend -- the cloud. “Over the last ten years, we’ve got most of the common business practices identified," Ron Huxter, CTO of the provincial government of Ontario, said at a recent conference, reported in ITWorld Canada. "The issues that we’re coming into now are sourcing the actual services -- in two to three years, SOA will fade into yet another sales banner like everything else has and it will transform into software-as-a-service (SaaS).
However, both Huxter and another conference speaker, Eduardo Bresani, CIO of Toronto Hydro, says that with the transition to SaaS, this brings about new issues in cost structures and potential security worries. “If it’s mission-critical activities… (use of cloud computing) really depends on what they are,� said Bresani. “You have to ask, ‘Is it capable of supporting enterprise-level applications, and what type?’ This could be even more problematic for government organizations, he says. “There’s no room for the cowboys of the '70s -- just responsible stewardship of the public purse,� he said.
Every paradigm, every change that sweeps the IT space promises greater integration, ease of use, and cost efficiencies. However, they also introduce new vulnerabilities that need new types of solutions. The rise of SOA, and now melding with cloud computing, is no exception.
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We may see a lot of larger organizations building and deploying applications using a SaaS model, but completely withing their own firewall. Sort of "intraSaaS". SaaS in this case is more of an internal delivery model than a business model. SOA and RIA (or WOA if you like) are in fact methods that allow for internal business apps to be delivered via an intraSaaS model, and that is much of what is going on today. This post prompted the idea to talk about intraSaaS, which I have also written about in my own blog at XAware.org here http://www.xaware.org/myblog/how-about-intrasaas-2.html
Bill Miller