SOA and Web-Services White Papers
Find out why runtime has become the focus of Web services management and SOA governance (vs. design time, development, staging and deployment). Learn how to simplify your life as you initiate your SOA; hint: start out by incrementally deploying Web services. Learn how to extract ROI from your SOA - maximizing it all the way. Examine these free white papers from Actional - use cases, best practices and "worst practices" - and learn from our collective experience.
Managing Business-Critical Applications: A Guide to Finding the Right Software
The right software for managing critical applications can actually optimize your business results. Consider this: your critical applications are those that are vital to increasing revenue or productivity. In other words, they execute your key business transactions and are key business assets that support revenue generation, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Read this buyers' guide and learn how to choose the right management software for your critical applications.
Application Portfolio Assessment Guide: Are Your Business-critical Applications at Risk?
This Assessment Guide helps you to create a high-level overview for each business-critical application, detailing the context of the application, highlighting risk factors and overall effectiveness of each application. This assessment, in turn, will provide a foundation for further investigation and actions to optimize the outcomes of your business-critical transactions and mitigate risk.
Actional Architecture Series: Actional for SOA Operations
The Actional SOA Operations architecture enables end-to-end SOA performance monitoring and alerting as well as fast root cause analysis—with high scalability and high performance. This paper presents a detailed description of the unique technology that makes these and other key characteristics possible.
SOA Operations Excellence with Progress Actional
To keep an SOA up and running smoothly and meet service-level agreements (SLAs), IT organizations must be able to monitor service interactions, understand dependencies, and quickly pinpoint the root causes of performance bottlenecks or failures. Learn how Progress Actional for SOA Operations can provide the key capabilities to reduce the risk of deployment.
SOA Worst Practices Volume II: A Look At Governance
SOA Worst Practices, Volume II, as the title suggests, is the follow-on white paper to SOA Worst Practices, Volume I: a collection, of dubious––and sometimes disastrous ––case studies of service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations. Each scenario describes and analyzes the critical SOA errors and lessons learned, and then a prescription is revealed to stimulate discussion and corrective possibilities.
The Current State of SOA Governance
As organizations begin to adopt service-oriented architectures (SOA), the topic of SOA governance -- the articulation and enforcement of policies related to Web-service lifecycles, implementation protocols, service access, information protection and service-level agreements -- is receiving an increasing amount of attention. ebizQ conducted this online survey in August 2006 in order to understand the current state of SOA governance from the practitioner’s point of view. Discover the surprising results.
The Right Infrastructure for SOA
The right SOA technology can accelerate business break throughs and ROI. But what is the "right" technology for your business? This white paper focuses on optimal integration and interoperability as the key and provides a decision framework for evaluating vendors' SOA approach and technology, to help companies get started on a practical SOA today.
New - Aberdeen Group: Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle
Between November 2006 and January 2007, Aberdeen Group examined the SOA management strategies of more than 200 companies across a variety of geographies, industries and company revenues. Aberdeen supplemented this online survey effort with telephone interviews with select survey respondents, gathering additional information on SOA management strategies, experiences, and results. The study aimed to identify emerging best practices for SOA operations management and governance, and provide a framework by which readers could assess their own organization’s capabilities and maturity.
Business Process Visibility: Aligning IT and Business Goals
IT must move towards managing service-oriented architectures (SOAs) from a business perspective, which means that IT managers must find the tools necessary to align its goals with those of the business. Progress® Actional® for Continuous Service Optimization gives IT managers the power to view business processes and transactions – and the infrastructure that supports them. Read this white paper and understand how business process visibility (BPV) enables organizations to maximize the business value their SOA delivers.
Why Runtime Governance is Critcal for SOA: A SOA Primer
With SOA services now in production within many organizations, system architects are realizing that the most critical control and governance issues take place in runtime. This SOA primer explains the details of Actional's comprehensive Web services governance solution. Read this free white paper and understand the various kinds of Web services management, their importance, and how to get started with what you need now.
SOA Worst Practices, Volume I
Make no mistake: SOA can be tricky. Learn from this compilation of "SOA Worst Practices" which traps to avoid. Learn the limits of XML firewalls. Find out how not to fall prey to consultants. Make sure you don't hand out your WSDL to passersby... This wisdom and much, much more from the experts at Actional.
Implementing a Successful Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Pilot Program: A SOA Introduction
This SOA introduction provides a detailed understanding of the essentials surrounding the planning your first SOA – mapping out both IT and business considerations as well as measurement and success criteria. By consolidating and reusing common services, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) offer many benefits to today's organizations. This whitepaper will guide those pursuing SOA towards proven best practices to increase the likelihood of success.
The Importance of Management in Enterprise-Class SOA: A SOA Infrastructure Overview
While core Web services standards successfully address the mechanics of allowing applications to talk to one another, a successful SOA implementation requires addressing the challenges that lie beyond the pure mechanics of communication -- zeroing in, in addition, on SOA infrastructure. Now, especially, global organizations are implementing enterprise SOA – and are demanding tools and assistance to meet the challenges offered up by this class of applications. This white paper discusses the world-class SOA governance solutions Actional offers to meet these needs and the underlying SOA infrastructure.
Maximizing Web Services Project ROI
Over the past several years, the emergence of Web services has become one of the most talked-about advances in the technology industry. Throughout corporate IT, there is growing interest - and a bit of skepticism - about the promise and potential of Web services for corporate computing. This white paper discusses the challenges - and substantial benefits - associated with implementing Web services-based SOA, how to measure SOA ROI - and extract the maximum profit from your SOA initiatives.
Breaking Through the Complexity: Getting Started With Web Services
Research shows that numbers of large corporations are moving steadily toward the adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs). At the same time, in these same organizations, architects and other IT managers are looking to Web services in the near-term as a means for cost-effective application and integration initiatives. This white paper recommends an incremental approach: getting started with Web services before moving on to full-scale SOA. In this scenario IT can employ small, targeted undertakings, and realize cost and time-to-market benefits of Web services on a project basis - while building bridges to SOA.
XML Web Services Security: Going Production
The number-one concern that prevents many enterprises from implementing Web Services in a meaningful way is the lack of understanding of what the security risks are. Common questions are: will standard firewalls and intrusion detection systems be sufficient? Will hacker attacks be the same as the ones I expect on my web site? Can I rely on vendors to provide adequate protection? Can I rely on SSL, VPNs and dedicated lines to protect my traffic? This white paper discusses the topic of XML Web services security in detail – and provides answers to the forgoing questions and more.
The Web Services Security Threat: Understanding the Risks
Can existing network security technologies ameliorate Web services risks? Are risks the same for internal and external Web Services? The benefits and ease of use make the adoption of Web Services a foregone conclusion. The real question that enterprises must ask themselves when adopting Web Services is: what are the most cost-effective steps to mitigate the risks of deploying Web Services - to an acceptable level - for the organization? Read this white paper for an enlightening discussion of these steps.
