Service Oriented Architecture

Rule of Thumb 1: SOA Benefits
There are many business and technical benefits to an SOA, but none is as important as the capability for a company to respond quickly and effectively to business change and to leverage that change to gain a competitive advantage.

Rule of Thumb 2: IT and Business as Peers
You cannot build a successful SOA model if you cannot forge peer working relationships between the IT and business groups.

Rule of Thumb 3: Incremental Business Services
In an agile business, incremental business services that mirror business process steps become the core deliverables of the IT group.

Rule of Thumb 4: Business-Smart IT Architects
Business-aware IT architects are the bridge between the company's IT and business units.

Rule of Thumb 5: Opportunities for Services
Within a business process, each interaction with an IT asset is a potential location for a service.

Rule of Thumb 6: Measuring Services

Message-level security
SOA brings changes in the requirements for data confidentiality and data integrity. When a message sent to party 1 (brokerage) contains parts intended for party 2 (bank), we need the ability to differently encrypt and/or sign the part that is intended for use only by party 2. Clearly, traditional transport layer security mechanisms such as SSL/TLS are not good enough here, as they cannot stop party 1 from reading and/or tampering with the message part intended for party 2.

Message-level security (as opposed to transport-level security) is a new approach to solve this problem. With this approach, different parts of a message can be protected differently, to make them usable only by intended parties in the message path.