IT unaware of SOA risks

SOA is making headway but few in IT appreciate the risks involved

IT professionals are not fully aware of the risks associated with service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployment, according to the latest research.

Research conducted on behalf of software testing firm AppLabs highlighted the majority of IT professionals have not appreciated the likelihood of system failures when introducing SOA.

“The nature of SOA implementation is extremely complex and traditional approaches to testing are insufficient,” said AppLabs Europe head of client engagement Graham Smith.

“It will take time for IT professionals to adapt to the way SOA applications are developed and maintained, which is completely different from developing and maintaining bespoke applications,” he added.

SOA also introduces risks associated with change controls and governance, Smith warned. “If an SOA service changes, it could have an impact on a number of applications and therefore have a detrimental effect on a company’s system," he explained. " SOA interfaces have to be well defined, documented and tightly controlled from a change point of view, hence a need for strict SOA governance.”

According to the AppLabs research 19 per cent of the IT professionals questioned did know how to approach quality management and SOA testing.

Governance is likely to an increasing problem for IT, said John Taylor, chief technology officer at Information Builder's iWay Software division. Speaking at IDC's SOA conference last week, he warned that IT leaders could be caught off-guard by the hidden costs of SOA governance. “It’s an IT problem so there is usually no funding for governance because everything is in reactive mode after firms normally try and enforce all their SOA policies at once,” he said.

In separate research, funded by Oracle and one of its system integrators, Griffiths Waite, showed that many UK IT leaders are committed to deploying SOA, but few have made much headway.

A survey conducted by the two vendors on the SOA strategies of 180 organisations found that 80 per cent had a SOA plan in place yet only 5 per cent of the organisations had achieved enterprise wide deployment. The survey also showed that this relative immaturity of SOA was consistent across all industries.