Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Social Responsibility's Strategic Benefits
December 15, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Ed Granger-Happ, CIO of Save the Children, for a discussion of how creating an organization that is socially responsible improves staffing, retention, leadership development and overall corporate health.
Working With and Communicating to Your Board of Directors
January 13, 2009, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM US/Eastern (GMT-5)
CIO panelists who will share tips and experiences working with their boards: Twila Day of SYSCO; Jeff O'Hare, West Corp.; Marc West, formerly with H&R Block.
IT's Role in Growing Mid-Market Companies
January 14, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM ET (GMT-5)
Mid-market Council members will share their companies' stories and challenges in driving or coping with growth. Panelists represent Veterinary Pet Insurance, Medicis Pharmaceutical, and Intrax Cultural Exchange.
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July 15, 2005 — CIO —
I’ve been talking about Web services’ latest incarnation, service-oriented architecture (SOA), since 2001. So imagine my surprise when I heard that Cisco, EMC and a host of network appliance makers claim to be in the SOA business.
After all, SOA is confusing enough without throwing in the kitchen sink of infrastructure. Every day, people confuse SOA with one of its many applications: B2B integration, software as a service, enterprise workflow—you name it. To them I’ve always said, "It’s applications as services, period."
But guess what? After a couple of years of singing that refrain, I’ve finally stopped being so narrow-minded. The reason? Many (if not most) organizations lack a sufficient motive to establish an enterprisewide SOA as I’ve been defining it. Yet if you broaden SOA to include an application-aware infrastructure, the SOA value proposition becomes more compelling.
The main motives for both the business side and IT to embrace SOA are quicker, cheaper application development and low-cost integration. Instead of writing a component or an application, you can call up that component or application from the app you’re developing and avoid redundancy. In the process, you’ve probably integrated two systems with relatively little pain.
But the payback for the business side can be elusive in the short term. In fact, it actually requires more work to develop applications in a service-oriented way if an enterprisewide SOA isn’t already in place. The problem is that initiatives for the greater good of the organization don’t jibe with the usual application development process. Normally, the business side asks IT for particular app functionality and creates some sort of specification for just the features it needs. They don’t allow for all the other applications that may share the same services, which is how an SOA needs to be designed.
So SOA needs an enterprisewide motive. And what is it that has nearly every organization in a mad scramble? Regulatory compliance. The storage and retrieval requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the security demands of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act require both ironclad enterprisewide processes and special infrastructure in the form of storage and security solutions. And without question, that infrastructure will become increasingly application-aware.
The past couple of years have seen a new breed of application-layer, XML-aware security appliances—from the likes of F5, Forum Systems and DataPower—that inspect packets at a deep level and block suspicious traffic. But these companies are going beyond XML firewalling. DataPower, for example, offers a vertical tool that binds Web services security to XML financial schema. And Cisco’s Aon initiative is supposed to result in a new line of XML-aware routers this summer. With real-time inspection of XML traffic, such devices will be able to identify compliance-related content and make sure it’s routed to the correct repositories, such as EMC’s Centerra for write-once archiving. Imagine an application-aware infrastructure that makes enterprise compliance transparent and relatively low maintenance. Most enterprises would give their eye teeth for that.
Just the basics, please. Sometimes we all need a refresher or we need to make sure our team and our colleagues are all on the same page.
Over 25 tutorials on everything from business intelligence to virtualization.