Service-Oriented Architecture - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 154

An SOA also maps IT systems easily and directly to a business's opera-
tional processes and supports a better division of labor between the business
and technical staff. One of the great potential advantages of solutions created
using an SOA with SOAP or REST Web Services is that they can help resolve
this perennial problem by providing better separation of concerns between
business analysts and service developers. Analysts can take responsibility
for defining how services fit together to implement business processes, while
the service developers can take responsibility for implementing services that
meet business requirements. This will ensure that the business issues are
well enough understood to be implemented in technology and the technol-
ogy issues are well enough understood to meet the business requirements.
Integrating existing and new applications using an SOA involves defin-
ing the basic Web Service interoperability layer to bridge features and
functions used in current applications such as security, reliability, transac-
tions, metadata management, and orchestration; it also involves the abil-
ity to define automated business process execution flows across the Web
Services after an SOA is in place. An SOA with Web Services enables the
development of services that encapsulate business functions and that are
easily accessible from any other service; composite services allow a wide
range of options for combining Web Services and creating new application
functionality.
As a prerequisite, one will have to deal with a plethora of legacy
technologies in order to service-enable them. But the beauty of
services and SOA is that the services are developed to achieve
interoperability and to hide the details of the execution environ-
ments behind them. In particular, for Web Services, this means the
ability to emit and consume data represented as XML, regardless of
development platform, middleware, operating system, or hardware
type. Thus, an SOA is a way to define and provision an IT infrastruc-
ture to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in
business processes, regardless of the operating systems or program-
ming languages underlying these applications.
7.1 Defining SOA
SOA provides an agile technical architecture that can be quickly and easily
reconfigured as business requirements change. The promise of SAO is that
it will break down the barriers in IT to implement business process flows