Industry View

SOA What? Why You Need an SOA Governance Framework

Igor Khurgin and Saurabh Verma of Acumen Solutions on why your enterprise needs a SOA governance framework before lawlessness takes over

By Igor Khurgin and Saurabh Verma, Acumen Solutions

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2) Set up Design Time Governance
a. Set up rules governing the definition and creation of services.
b. Create a cross functional team responsible for identifying business areas which will most benefit by service sharing and its associated capabilities
c. Set up an architecture team to technically validate the service and enforce its compliance with SOA standards

3) Deploy Run Time Governance
a. Augment current IT operational functions to control the definition and enforcement of policies around availability, security and monitoring of deployed services

4) Regiment Change Time Governance
a. Create and enforce a robust change management process to manage and balance the process for changing service functions in response to ever-changing business needs

A good governance framework provides three main benefits all which lead to increased enterprise confidence in the IT Department's ability to deliver upon the promise of SOA.
-Full utilization of services (e.g. SOA processes) because they are known and accessible to other developers within the organization which results in improved ROI
-Predictable performance (i.e. no high volume glitches or expensive underutilization)
-Prevention of security breaches and/or methods to detect or trace any potential breaches

Without an effective governance model it is extremely difficult to enforce consistent management and security policy to make sure all these resources are standards compliant, properly secured and well monitored. So smart enterprises have made SOA governance frameworks an imperative part of any SOA implementation in their organization today.

Igor Khurgin, SOA Practice Manager, and Saurabh Verma, Director Global Services, are resident experts at Acumen Solutions (www.acumensolutions.com), a business and technology consulting firm with office across the U.S. and Europe. They can be reached respectively at ikhurgin@acumensolutions.com and sverma@acumensolutions.com.