The Benefits of a Shared Services Architecture

The vast majority of organizations have multiple technology platforms in use on a daily basis to run their businesses. As requirements have developed over time, these systems have been integrated with multiple different integration technologies leading to multiple different ways to get at the data. This in turn has lead to excess cost by paying for multiple integration technologies, incredibly complex architectures that are quite brittle and prone to failure, and an almost total absence of reuse.

Implementing a ‘Shared Services Architecture’ using the SOA Gateway presents an opportunity to gain a number of immediate benefits while positioning an organization for future growth:

• Standardization on a single integration technology can save $500,000 per year or more annually according to Gartner (Reduce Costs of Data Integration by Rationalizing Tools and Infrastructure, and Centralizing Skills)
  
  
• Your software development resources need only learn and understand one integration technology saving money in terms of developer education and time to complete a task.
  
  
• Your software maintenance teams only need to install and maintain one set of integration software.

This architecture is also sometimes referred to as a ‘Shared Information Architecture’. Using the SOA Gateway to implement this architecture can result in even more benefits.

• Standards based access to services will result in new development resources contributing more quickly and with less training.
  
  
• Policy based security can be implemented across your organization so that a policy is defined once centrally and does not have to be replicated to different and probably incompatible platforms.
  
  
• A central log of activity can lead to the ultimate level of governance of your data. Consider the impact of a transaction that runs on multiple systems logging to a central log in sequence and in a similar format regardless of the system being used.
  
  
• Services can be registered in a central, standard repository thus developers will always use the most up to date version of a service.
  
  
• Services can be made available in minutes instead of weeks or months as can occur with traditional integration methodologies.
  
  
• Where data must be obfuscated, a central, policy based approach can be used thus leading to consistent obfuscation of data across the enterprise.

Starting with the simple Gartner statistic that this can save $500,000 per year or more, implementing a Shared Services Architecture and specifically using the SOA Gateway to do this will result in increased savings to your organization and will leave your organizations’ systems lean, agile and ready for anything you will need them to do in the future.

Mobile connectivity to the back office

Mobile networks and the TCP/IP standard have enabled simple, straightforward physical connectivity to back office machines from mobile devices. However, accessing many of the resources on those machines, such as databases or even application code, requires software to be installed on the mobile device. This can be expensive, extremely difficult to maintain, brittle and for many of the simpler mobile devices, too resource hungry to run. With the advent of Cloud Computing, connecting to such back office resources in the Cloud is more important than ever.

The SOA Gateway solution from Risaris Limited enables mobile devices to access and update these back end resources in a simple and cost effective manner. It offers the following benefits:

• No software installation on the mobile device which offers a number of advantages:
  
  • It means that very cheap, small mobile devices with limited resources can communicate with Enterprise systems.
  • No software installation means no software to be kept up to date on the mobile device.
  • It means that mobile devices can connect directly "out of the box" to these back end resources. Existing solutions to get at this data requires complex middleware to make this work.
  • The standards used are identical to those used already for getting at unstructured data such as gifs, sound files, videos etc.
  • These standards work very well within the Cloud infrastructure.
    
    
• The SOA Gateway allows access to data on all platforms from IBM zOS mainframes to *Nix systems to MS Windows providing one point of access to your back end systems.
  
  
• The SOA Gateway provides a simple application to application communication mechanism to enable access to applications running on these back end systems.
  

Try it today. Download your free trial at SOA Gateway.

Are the lessons of SOA being ignored with the cloud?

Many of the lessons of SOA have been lost in terms of what SOA originally endeavoured to achieve from a technology perspective. SOA originally promised the ability to choose and use best of breed technologies from different vendors inter operating using a number of standards. This was watered down to being able to use SOA software stack from vendor a, b or c.

The Cloud providers have now done the same by locking people into their particular Cloud so that if you go with Cloud provider a, b or c, you are simply locking yourself into yet another proprietary architecture.

Ideally what would be nice would be to have a generic Cloud image and run it in whatever Cloud you wish. Perhaps for a given workload, the day will even come you can choose your Cloud provider on a daily basis depending on what are you key criteria (e.g. cost) and then deploy your image to that Cloud......however, this wont happen anytime soon.

In the mean, the use of interoperability standards can help to allow you to black box your Cloud providers to move workload from one to the other. You can find more on this topic here if you are interested.

Can SOA deliver on integration promises ?

Much of what SOA was related to in the early days were the Web Services standards that enabled much quicker, cost effective integration of data and business logic.

One of the goals of 'SOA' was the concept of using best of breed technologies that integrate together. The idea that you could pick the best technology for the job whether it was from vendor a, b or c and it would work with the best of what vendors x, y and z delivered was a very attractive one.

Yet another goal of 'SOA' is reuse of services which comes down to the core of the question here. If the SOA stack is proprietary, it makes integration with other technologies and thus reuse from them as difficult and expensive as it ever was.

However, the larger vendors have sadly dumbed down what was promised by insisting on you buying 'their' SOA stack of software and providing some integration possibilities using standards on the outside but with proprietary internals with dependencies on their particular stacks.

If SOA only promised that we would have services, any well run IT organization has been building 'services' for many years that are still reused on a regular basis today.

One of the original promises of SOA was to allow better, more cost effective integration between best of breed technologies that could then deliver the services that the business required throughout the enterprise. The easier integration facilitates a level of reuse not possible with proprietary stacks. This ease of integration applies in the Cloud more than ever as what organization wants to simply spend money to move to another proprietaray environment in the Cloud ?

The SOA Gateway is a 'best of breed' technology that makes accessing your data and business logic easier while also working with any other 'best of breed' technologies from other organizations.

Transitioning your workload to the Cloud

Various Cloud computing organizations are offering the Nirvana in terms of IT where you only pay for what you use and capacity planning can become a thing of the past because of the elasticity provided by Cloud implementations. One would wonder why more organizations do not move into either a private or public Cloud, however, the answer is relatively straightforward.

All of the Cloud implementations available today make resources available on a limited number of platforms with a limited number of software stacks. While there is nothing wrong in principle with this, it means that if you are running your business on anything other than the limited platforms offered, it will require a conversion effort to prepare systems to be moved into the Cloud. This conversion effort represents another expensive exercise effectively to put your applications on yet another proprietary software stack.

A standards based approach to Cloud will pay a lot of dividends. While the Cloud itself still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of standards, the usage of existing inter operability standards like SOAP and REST will position your applications and data to move into the Cloud. The basic concept is:

- Create SOAP or REST Services around your core assets meaning your existing applications and data.

- Moving forward, your clients or consumers of these applications will use these SOAP or REST Services to get their data.

- Identical SOAP or REST Services may then be created in a public or private Cloud.

- Data can then be moved into the Cloud implementation.

- Once completed, your consumers of this data must simply be pointed at the new Cloud based SOAP or REST Services.

While such an approach does have costs associated with it, these are likely to be similar or less than what it will cost to move your applications on a proprietary basis into the Cloud. Consider also that this approach leaves you with the flexibility to potentially move workload easily again to perhaps a cheaper Cloud provider thus providing the optimum combination of flexibility and choice of provider. One requirement you will have will be that the tool or tools you use for this effort also run on multiple platforms and technologies. The SOA Gateway is such a tool. You can find further information on this topic at the document found here.

Change management, as it used to be called, or the new buzzword ‘governance’ is a key component of any SOA.

If we consider that one of the main benefits of SOA is reuse, this can sometimes only happen when slight modifications are made to a service to allow it to be used for a different purpose. The change will normally not impact on the previous use but to ensure reuse, the change must be made.

It is key that an existing, running service does not break so there must be different versions of a service available during the transition phase. However, once working, it is essential that the existing users of the old service are upgraded to avoid having to support multiple versions of the service. As such the usage of your services is key to this change management.

SOA Governance with the correct tools can be extremely helpful in upgrading services ensuring continued reused and deprecation of older copies of the service. There are two documents here which discuss how both life cycle and usage governance of your services can help your organization. These governance capabilities are all implemented in the SOA Gateway.

Is SOA dead within the enterprise ?

It is often said that SOA is dead simply because it does not appear to have been adopted in any great way by many enterprises but nothing could be further from the truth.

We need to consider here that enterprises change very very slowly for good reasons. They have systems running for many years that have served them very well. Many have learned through painful experience that making quick changes can costs millions in lost business and productivity through systems working slowly or not being available.

The point is that 2, 3 or even 5 years in the IT cycle of an enterprise is not a huge amount of time. Many will IPL (reboot to readers unfamiliar with this term) their enterprise systems (normally large mainframes) only once or twice a year which may surprise many people who see Windows and Linux as being the be all and end all of computing and a regular reboot as being a fact of life. Many enterprises have adopted a SOA approach over the years already so SOA is really just a new term for what they have been doing before it was called SOA.

Many enterprises have been using services for many years and will continue to align these with the external services provided via the Web and other new channels over time and more than likely even when someone has come up with some new term for it. The SOA Gateway is a simple way of introducing a SOA structure into your enterprise.