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.