architecture

Talk about the hype bout cloud computing has outstripped the actual hype, from vendors who don't quite know what to do with cloud. That's good, because it lets users do what they want.

Bringing the next generation of enterprise architects up to speed won't be an easy task. While most experts agree that the job is a critical one, given the corporate emphasis building business infrastructure in the most technically efficient way, training these future experts has proven difficult.

An effective enterprise architecture (EA) practice can eliminate business-IT-alignment problems, bring order and purpose to an organization's use of technology, and lead an enterprise on the road to greater collaboration and innovation. The problem is that with these ambitious goals, EAs often face the daunting task of convincing business and IT leaders with operational responsibilities, near-term deliverables, and parochial interests to focus on the value of enterprise synergies. It's all too common to see EA programs crash and burn because architects fail to convince key stakeholders of their value.

SOA efforts require well-designed information architectures in order to base their activities on trusted data -- or else the business value of the SOA project may evaporate. Forrester's Gene Leganza shares advice on building a pragmatic IA strategy.

Broadening adoption of a service-oriented architecture requires more planning, better management tools and more effective measurement of what's working -- and not working.

The EBS Building Society, one of Ireland's largest financial services companies, wanted SOA for its ability to quickly model (and change) business processes. And it was IT Head David Yeates' responsibility to secure the resulting architecture. Here, he explains the process his company took to achieve secure SOA.

What do enterprise architecture, virtualization, security, business intelligence, and organizational culture have in common with each other and with SOA? If you answered "very little to nothing at all," then think again because each one of these can make or break your SOA implementation.

The SOA Consortium and CIO magazine recently announced the winners of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Case Study Competition. All of the winners successfully delivered business or mission value using an SOA approach -- and they all shared these 8 characteristics.

Last week I promised to move from dissertation to illumination by shining a light on some sterling examples of real-world SOAs. In each case, the IT professionals leading these initiatives understood from the get-go that SOA is more about business processes than services.

One of the best ways to secure SOA services is to hide them behind a port knocking firewall. Port knocking makes your system appear as if it offers no services at all. Any cracker who comes a-knocking' will either conclude that nobody is home, or that your administrators are smart enough to make access so difficult it's not worth the trouble to try to break in. But here's an even better way to hide your SOA services so they appear invisible to anyone except legitimate clients.

Cast Iron Systems, maker of an appliance for integrating SaaS and on-premise applications, is introducing a new version that adds data cleansing and migration tools, along with a library of prebuilt integration templates for connecting many commercial software-as-a-service products.