Management and Governance Challenges
Once composite/integration applications have been built using SOA, the challenge is to ensure that they perform as expected. Operational control and visibility becomes more important and complex as there are multiple applications involved. Key challenges are in the areas of SLA management, security enforcement, identity propagation, audits and regulatory compliance. The complexities increase with scale as new application versions are published and additional applications are incorporated into the SOA fabric. Thus it becomes necessary to automate the management and governance of the SOA infrastructure for SOA to be effective.

Example: In composite application exhibiting slow response or throughput it is even more challenging to figure out where the problem originates. SOADirector automates the root cause analysis and can take corrective/preventive actions such as load balancing, service provisioning, sending alerts and/or adaptive routing based on pre-configured policies.

SOADirector is an enterprise-class SOA management and governance product that enables users to secure, govern and manage web services and business processes. SOADirector is positioned between the service consumer and service provider, and gathers message data and enforces policy on every transaction to provide unprecedented visibility and control. SOADirector is a standard based product that offers platform independence and seamless interoperability with other products. It uses SOAStore™ (or any JAXR complaint registry/repository) as the underlying registry/repository for design time governance.

SOADirector manages the runtime delivery of new and existing services across their lifecycle. By actively managing the service runtime, it simplifies the tasks of rolling-out new services, scaling them for performance and availability and ensuring easy upgrades to new versions. Users can govern the runtime processing of messages flowing through their SOAs by enforcing management policies without writing code.

SOADirector offers a number of advantages over existing solutions for management and governance enablement, including faster implementation and deployment cycles, a flexible platform for future expansion offering a high degree of reuse, easy extensibility, seamless interoperability and an improved ROI.

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The following are key features of SOADirector:

> Enterprise-Class Management

• Enable business and service level policy definition and enforcement
• Capture service interdependencies displaying underlying services, applications and infrastructure
• Manage SOA from a business process perspective
• View, manage and control across a heterogeneous environment of multiple platforms and protocols
• Define, sort and prioritize by business and IT metrics
• Manage, measure and alert on performance and availability metrics
• Access control for services and processes
• Monitoring, auditing and alerting
• Identify interoperability issues
• Automatically act on monitored data, based on pre-configured policies

> Enterprise Functionalities

• Support for standard (SOAP) and non-standard Web services on multiple transports
• Service Virtualization when used with gateway
• Load balancing and failover support when used with gateway
• Easy integration with existing ESM infrastructure
• Content based routing
• Email, SOAP, JMS, and custom action alerting
• Powerful reporting functionalities
• Support for clustering

> Security

• Support for WS-Security (digital signature, XML encryption, authentication and authorization)
• Support for single sign-on and identity propagation using SAML
• Integration with LDAP and other identity providers
• Prevention of unauthorized access
• Support for WS-Trust
• Monitoring and enforcing security policies
• Complex security policies

> Runtime Governance

• Policies for SLA Management
• Policies for service and process audits
• Automated security enforcement
• Distributed policy enforcement