Although it was created in 2006, soon the concept of cloud computing was no longer just a trend and became a subject frequently discussed and planned by the IT industry. Several surveys by different organizations revealed that the model was a priority for businesses in U.S in 2010. But do these managers know the various contexts that can help their companies prepare for cloud and are aware of factors that may cause problems in their operations?
Cloud computing encompasses a series of concepts such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and the most famous of all, SaaS (Software as a Service).
During a lecture delivered at the Fourth Annual Conference on Corporate Technologies, the analyst and vice president at Gartner, Daryl Plummer, stated that “despite being based on concepts already established, the cloud is still often misused by managers” and pointed SOA governance as an important tool in achieving success with the adoption of cloud computing. But how SOA governance can boost the maturity of a company to its application in cloud and how it increases the chances of the company to succeed in the adoption of the concept?
Increasingly services are being made available on the web and it is increasingly common for companies to adopt business solutions such as CRM and ERP in the cloud available in SaaS format. Thus, the need for integration between applications being used in the cloud with internal applications arises. It grows, too, the dependence between the company’s business processes and services used from the cloud. And hence the lack of knowledge of dependencies between applications, business processes and services - internal or cloud - can lead to business disruption if any critical element of this mesh stops working. It is this scenario in which the IT sections of businesses feel the need for governance.
The first step is to understand that SOA Governance is deeply linked with visibility and control responsibilities. Getting to know what applications are, what services are exposed and consumed by which applications and business processes and yet have information on reusable components and routines and on integrations in various formats used by the company are ongoing concerns of SOA Governance. Allied to this aspect of visibility, there is the concept of control responsibility, where each paper related to creation and evolution of the items listed above need to be mapped and assigned to people in real companies. Of course there are various levels of maturity and different challenges for companies to find that level and set your SOA governance process with the correct “size and weight”.
But back to cloud, we go to an example to illustrate the concept of SOA governance applied to cloud computing: Imagine the business process for car insurance. It is normal that the pricing takes into account information such as: (i) the level of crime in certain areas, (ii) payment history of the bidder in the market, (iii) information on previous claims. The system that supports the business process can then have dependencies on an array of services that are integral parts of cloud computing and if one process fails to perform, the entire business operation would come to a screeching halt.
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