Runtime Governance

With service-oriented architectures (SOA) now in production within many organizations, system architects are realizing that the most critical control and SOA governance issue is in runtime. Data point after data point has demonstrated that many SOA implementations are just not working in production as designed or expected. Reasons for this include:

• Lack of a single end-to-end governance technology or solution.
• "Rogue services" in production.
• No clear understanding of the demands and uses of Web services in production.
• Manually populate registry metadata about the service lifecycle.

Figure: Progress Actional provides auto-discovery and mapping to improve runtime governance. In the figure above, Actional auto-discovered and "mapped" an application with 30+ service consumers.

Runtime governance is a critical piece of the overall governance strategy of any organization, generating the process adherence, measurement, enforcement and feedback that are necessary for an effective lifecycle approach. Progress® Actional® for Runtime Governance provides SOA security and compliance so that you can detect service failures before they occur.

Figure: SOA business process path explorer.

In planning a proper SOA deployment, it is important to have runtime governance included early in the development cycle. It is a critical requirement for proper SOA security and compliance, and helps eliminate risks associated with non-compliance and invisible interdependencies that can lead to SOA failures, missed business opportunities and government regulation violations.

With the ability to automatically discover services and consumers in production environments, Actional makes it possible for SOA-enabled organizations to immediately and automatically apply governance policies. Using Actional for runtime governance will:

• Ensure that design time governance is enforced at runtime.
• Auto discover "rogue" service and dependencies.
• Auto apply policies to rogue services to dramatically reduce risk.
• Automatically report to registry stats including:
  - SOA service level/usage metrics
  - Service consumers and provider dependencies
  - Rogue service discovery and dependencies
• Synchronization of WS-Policy information.

Figure: Actional automatically "discovered" a service network.

In addition to providing solutions for runtime governance, Progress Software delivers solutions for business transaction assurance, root cause analysis, complex event processing, and data interoperability. They also off a complete SOA infrastructure portfolio designed to give every enterprise the operational responsiveness they need to achieve revenue growth and improved customer satisfaction.