Moving to cloud computing raises a lot of issues, but if a company is already engaged in service oriented architecture, things go a lot smoother.
Mike Kavis, CTO of M-Dot, sat down with my ebizQ partner-in-crime, Peter Schooff, in a new podcast to talk about SOA and the cloud and the advantages and difficulties enterprises face moving from SOA to the cloud.
Listen to or download the 7:18 podcast below:
Practicing SOA gives many companies a leg up when they start looking at cloud formations, Mike observes. First, he says, there's the loosely coupled aspect of SOA -- very important. "Companies who aren't practicing service oriented architecture will be tightly coupled to their databases, will be tightly coupled to their infrastructure. So it's very hard for them to move, or shift, or change things around," he says. "Whereas companies with a service oriented architecture can look at their entire offering and say, 'hey, these pieces make sense to move the cloud, these other pieces don't,' and they can make those moves. Without a service oriented architecture, it almost becomes an all or nothing proposition and that's not a recipe for success."
Mike establishes, then, that SOA is a big enabler for cloud computing. But at the same time, cloud computing is a big enabler for SOA. As Mike put it in the interview: "We all know that SOA has had its troubles catching on, and I think the movement to the cloud is one of the best things that could happen to SOA. Because what you'll find is its very hard to move to the cloud when you're tightly coupled to your architecture. And then I also see a lot more requirements for businesses to integrate with partners, to leverage mashups, to do those types of things, connect into other Software-as-a-Service providers."
Mike will be a speaker at our upcoming SOA in Action virtual conference, an informative two-day event to be held October 28-29. SOA in Action will bring together leading experts and practitioners from across the IT spectrum to discuss strategies and best practices for promoting and deploying SOA throughout the enterprise. Join us for an agenda packed full of sessions and panel discussions on the latest thinking in SOA.
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