Planning_and_Impleme.. - didier beck weblog

Planning and Implementing SOA
www.butlergroup.com
The Datamonitor survey already mentioned indicated that a lack of technical in-house expertise (27%) is
the main reason for not adopting SOA. This factor was particularly significant as a barrier to deployment in
the Public Sector and Manufacturing vertical markets.
However, there are a number of other reasons why SOA is not seeing a wider uptake, with security concerns
a significant contributor. For many end users (and rather more so, the IT department that is tasked with
ensuring security), the idea of having their applications exposed as services to all comers on the Web signals
increased vulnerability. There is a concern that the flexibility of SOA may come at the expense of reduced
security. The Evans Data survey also found that authentication of on-line identities is the greatest security
challenge to Web services, with one in four respondents saying that the inability to confirm the identities of
on-line users and services is the biggest problem.
Whilst there are many security initiatives under way, gaining better understanding of the issues and how they
may be overcome (for example, by supporting encryption once messages travel outside firewalls) will help.
A basic lack of awareness is also limiting adoption; the Datamonitor survey showed that 13% of the
respondents had not heard about SOA, whilst another 17% could see no need for SOA, or had not looked
at SOA yet. This was most prevalent in those verticals with low adoption rates, in particular the
Manufacturing sector.
The Evans Data survey highlighted another important issue – 25% of respondents stated that the leading
problem in implementation of Web services was either a lack of industry standards or changes in standards,
a 67% increase from the previous survey on this issue. Certainly, standards around SOA are still maturing,
and it is interesting to see that this is seen as a barrier to adoption.
Enterprises expect cost savings to come from SOA deployment, though
these will be in the long term.
In the Datamonitor survey, only 5% of the surveyed enterprises saw cost issues as a reason for not adopting
SOA. The majority (67%) of the surveyed organisations that are adopting SOA do not expect their overall
IT spending to increase as a result. As SOA impacts all areas of an enterprise’s IT structure (and therefore
its spending), it also suggests that enterprises believe that SOA will help them to save costs.
Implementing SOA certainly requires investment in its early stages, in areas such as planning, setting up a
roadmap, assessment of business processes, and re-design of the IT structure. One of the main concerns is that
Implementing SOA
certainly requires
investment in its early
stages, in areas such
as planning, setting
up a roadmap,
assessment of
business processes,
and re-design of the
IT structure.
new infrastructure and new ways of working will be needed to make SOA work.
This implies that pilot and early adopter projects will have a net cost to the
organisation, and will therefore require very careful justification. Converting to
SOA is a fundamental change that will require the restructuring of many existing
applications, in order to use the available resources in an optimal way.
Potential cost savings will drive the adoption of SOA. If one can reuse services
that have already been built, less time and money is required when developing
new applications, driving costs down by eliminating duplicate systems.
However, where many of the benefits are likely to be realised most quickly are
where new projects allow access to new markets, by enabling loosely-coupled
yet automated interactions to existing systems.
As well as infrastructure, an area that is likely to require greater spending is
IT services – in part, with technology vendors but also with services providers
that have already assisted in successful SOA implementations. Learning from others’ success is a major
benefit to the ‘second wave’ of adopters – as is understanding where projects have gone astray.
A piece of valuable insight from the Quocirca survey showed that those survey respondents who had gone
fully down the SOA route saw major benefits for their organisations. These organisations are more
competitive, due to the flexibility of their optimised environments. Often it is new functionality that is being
implemented in a service-oriented manner, although there is also an element of re-architecting existing
infrastructure to be more service oriented.
6 Section 1: SOA Deployment
December 2006