SOA Governance Integration
Enterprise-level applications must support robust and reliable management features to be able to comply with business requirements, government legislation, service level agreements (SLAs), and customer and trading partner expectations. Run-time governance focuses specifically on the challenges of, and requirements for, successfully running service-oriented architecture (SOA)–based systems that meet these requirements. The quality of service delivered by a business system is the predominant factor that defines its success or failure.
Businesses deploying SOA-based systems into production face a number of challenges, including the following:
- Minimizing the cost of maintenance and upgrades, and allowing incremental updates
- Allowing rapid change through business process management and composition tools
- End-to-end security; this includes trust and protection of the privacy of message senders, receivers, and content
- Identifying, managing, and repairing exceptions as they occur
- Decoupling of services and consumers
- Measuring and proving the business value of SOA applications to offset cost concerns
- Control (governance) of the proliferation of duplicate or otherwise unnecessary services
- Facilitating the identification of the appropriate services required by potential users to reduce initial development cost
- Managing the life cycle of services to minimize the cost and risk of ongoing maintenance and change
- Simplifying the actual usage of appropriate services (decoupling location, transport, policies, standards, and messaging styles)
- Reporting facilities used to identify who is using which service, where, and why
The Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit supports integration with two third-party run-time governance systems:
- BizTalk Management Point from SOA Software, Inc.
- BizTalk Nano Agent from AmberPoint, Inc.