Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) is changing how businesses innovate and operate. It is all about building software to interconnect and automate the systems, processes and infrastructure in your company. Businesses use SOA to connect legacy systems with newer systems, reduce software costs, increase productivity and create a competitive advantage. It can be a great tool to manage big data, cloud data and data hierarchy.
What is a Service Oriented Architecture?
The Service Oriented Architecture is not a new architectural style, not a new technique, not a new development methodology, not a new set of APIs or a tool, even it was formalized in 1996 and became widespread with the emergence of the Web. However, SOA is a new model of IT infrastructure based on a service-oriented view of applications, business processes, and IT infrastructure. In today’s business environment, competitive advantage is achieved by continuously improving business processes.
SOA is a framework that enables businesses to focus on business services. These services are packaged as software components. A business can reuse these software components whenever they need them. The components run on any platform, any technology and within any organization.
Steps to implement SOA in your business processes
Although each company must face different business needs, there are common challenges that they must take into account to ensure the success of SOA implementation. Take into account the following steps to develop a good SOA implementation strategy in your company.
1. Define Your goal
Why do you need an SOA? What is the business value you’re trying to achieve by implementing the SOA? You will find many answers to this question, such as reducing maintenance costs or modernizing your business processes, but the business needs and objectives should be the most important.
2. Define your business processes:
What business process do you want to automate? As the organization’s core application developer, you’re expected to help
define how the business processes in your organization will be automated. According to Conway’s law, the design of the architecture of a system and its processes must be the representation of the real organization and communication structure of the business, so that’s why it is important to define your business process before implementing an SOA.
3. Unify vision partners
Implementing your processes with SOA is a great challenge for your team, so it is necessary that leaders and developers can be aligned under a single vision. Support as a team and communication will allow the information to be congruent and have a
streamlined business interconnection.
4. An ESB can integrate your system
One important thing to consider is that developers don’t need to build integrations from scratch. SOA is a type of architecture that exposes services using standard network protocols to send requests or access data, so it is possible to reuse current functions instead of re-creating them. Using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) will allow the integration of services and reduce the number of complex interfaces.
5. Avoid a short-term approach
Although SOA allows meeting the current needs of your business processes, it is important that your team design an architecture under a global approach to the company, so it can meet future needs.
What are the benefits of a Service Oriented Architecture?
There are many advantages of using Service Oriented Architecture, but one of the main benefits is the reuse of its components. Through reuse, the services that were developed at a certain time can be used to create new services, this allows the company to have more services in the shortest possible time and with less investment. With the application of SOA, interoperability and integration between heterogeneous applications and technologies is achieved through a common API.
Thanks to this, services are universally available to any application developer in the company. Services also provide separation between applications, and the developers of an application don’t have to worry about other applications, and they are more flexible to change as the business changes.
Some other benefits of automating your business process with an SOA are listed below.
- The separation between services and processes allows developers to specialize in different programming languages.
- It allows better control and broad visibility of the business structure.
- The architecture implementation of a business process allows simplifying and optimizing its organizational capacity.
- Facilitates adaptation to change, with the integration of legacy systems.
- Maintenance costs are reduced, and the investment made in systems is amortized.
- It is a first step to innovation and modernization of service development, in line with the dynamism of the market.
