How To Get Started On SOA Policy Management

Policy-based processing increases flexibility by allowing key business and technical decisions to be easily visible and changeable rather than being hard-coded into applications. With service-oriented architecture (SOA), policy is emerging as a generalized function across an SOA platform, with its own life cycle and tooling. Historically, policy management has had separate silos for each policy domain (like security or management) but with SOA many policies are centered on services, and the number of opportunities for integration and synergy across policy silos is increasing. SOA policy management can improve business monitoring, security auditing, and regulatory compliance efforts — and increase the direct business relevance of service policies. Now is the time for enterprise architects to understand SOA policy management and integrate it into their SOA strategies — or at minimum, to build appropriate SOA strategy placeholders for SOA policy.