The first step to achieving business agility is to “SOA-enable” your business applications. By “SOA-enable” I mean that the capabilities within each of your business applications should be delivered by a set of services in addition to the traditional application user interfaces. These services can be loosely coupled with those of other applications, to compose dynamic and agile business processes.
These dynamic business processes can be integrated with other business processes to create highly agile applications that enables your company to respond to changes in your business environment without requiring expensive and lengthy software development.
The good news is, if you have purchased enterprise application packages over the last few years then they should have been “SOA-enabled” using Web services technology. If they are not then get your vendor(s) to give you the service interfaces for your applications, this should be free if you have a support contact in place.
(more…)
There is no doubt that many SME directors are examining the value proposition of deploying their business applications in the cloud to take advantage of the agile flexible self-service that cloud technologies can provide. So I am always on the look-out for new information on what it take to deploy secure applications in the cloud.
Just the other day I received a mail-shot from OpSource.net with an attention grabbing headline “There is no such thing as a Private Cloud”. So with raised eye brow I clicked on the email and found an invitation to a webinar by Phil Wainewright called “There’s no such thing as a Private Cloud” plus a link to a white paper called “Enterprise Meet Cloud: Mapping a safe passage to enterprise cloud adoption”.
I was impressed with the webinar and white paper and I would recommend them to any one looking to use the cloud to deploy mission critical business applications and are concerned about security issues in the cloud.
Note I have no connection with the guys at OpSource.net however I have been tracking them for a number of years now (before Cloud became the in-thing). They also offer a “white-label” cloud service for those companies who want to offer their clients a cloud-based offering without having to make the $multi-million investment in creating a secure cloud hosting infrastructure.
OpSource is certainly a company to watch.