Always-On Enterprise Information Systems With Service-Oriented Architecture and Load Balancing

Software Component: Service Oriented Architecture

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and its paradigms provide efficient IT environment for business processes to run and manage them effectively and efficiently. SOA is a framework to address the requirement of loosely coupled, standards-based and protocol-independent distributed computing, mapping enterprise information systems to the overall business process flow (Gong and Janssen, 2012). A SOA-enabled business process uses IT services also called as eservices which are distributed, virtualized and can be consumed 24*7 by overcoming geographic limitations. SOA provides dynamical business processes that can also run across different organizations and are able to be constructed to achieve a higher flexibility and agility. As stated by Aalst et al. 2007, for the last 20 years enterprise information systems have been becoming more “process-aware” instead of “data-aware”. This forces EIS to be designed with business process perspective. Business processes and their mature EIS implementation bring successful results. Business processes of the enterprises are lacking of efficient and successful integration of IT applications to the other key processes. This problem results in time and money consuming issues because data integrity, repeatable and inconsistent tasks and challenging maintenance problems are faced.

Although SOA can be defined in several ways, all definitions can be categorized in two main perspectives, namely business perspective and technical perspective. Business perspective can be analyzed in terms of business processes and business services, whereas technical perspective can be analyzed in terms of software components and operational resources. The two perspectives, their components, and their interrelationships are illustrated in the Figure 1.

Figure 1.

SOA with Technical and Business Perspective (OMG, nodate)