Providing and Consuming External Services
Connected Services Framework
Many enterprise organizations want to leverage external services in order to
reduce the cost of internal IT support and management. Working with these
service providers in the past has been difficult due to the variety of
different interface requirements and the lack of integration capability with
internal systems. The need to integrate services while still maintaining the
security and integrity of the enterprise is particularly important. What
mechanisms are available to connect these third parties across the corporate
firewall? Providing or consuming external services requires that the services
be easy to discover and integrate using standardized interfaces that enable
enterprises to determine how best to use the capability and to understand the
expected level of risk.
