SOA and Data Integration

Service oriented architecture (SOA) simplifies the complexity of enterprise applications and is more economical to manage over time.  But there is no “SOA-in-a-box”.   SOA provides a much better service and efficiency if the application architecture and business needs of the enterprise are understood before the change.  The change has to be driven by breaking down the existing application architecture and data flow into primitive components such as data, API, business functions and security.  Each of these components has to be implemented as service interfaces.  The service interfaces are developed based on the data flow between systems.  This breakdown and abstraction provides an ability to configure and expose processes, complex business functions and also applications as service.  With cloud computing, these interfaces can be inside or outside the enterprise.   Thus SOA provides an abstraction to applications, systems and databases from the underlying data interfaces and data.  This provides the ability to change through configuration as opposed to redevelopment.  The adoptability or ability to change, with configuration changes, based on the business needs is the core benefit of SOA.  An enterprise with effective SOA implementation provides the platform to create applications with smooth flow of data between applications, systems and database.  The key goal of data integration is achieved with loosely coupled architecture in the complex environment.  The ability of SOA to abstract complex business processes into simple configurable interfaces is architecturally well suited for complex data integration activities.