It is in the peak of the hype curve, Cloud computing. While in hype's peak, every one jumps on it, so it becomes hot.
However, Cloud Computing also has its reasons for coming into being. And it will change the face of computing, with a lasting effect, in the years to come.
Cloud, as all other technical revolutions, is not going to solve world hunger. But it will help solve many business and IT problems. The most prominent are the pay as you go and use what you need models. You can kick start something, with little and with the hope of expanding, based on the demands. And it is leading computing to the services arena. We used to think about our systems deployments and stacks of hardware that supported the deployment as commodities. No more. Cloud enables us to look at those as services. This coupled with software, provides powerful service platforms. For example, now you can have any computing element, even something like middleware available as a service, thanks to the cloud.
SOA middleware deployed on the cloud can be used to expose your internal enterprise to your external world, including suppliers, customers and partners. The challenge is of course, to leverage the cloud, without compromising security and ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of the piles of enterprise data models. Hence, just for the sake of going with cloud, an organization cannot afford to put everything to run with the cloud. There are elements that you should expose to the cloud and there are elements that you should not.
What could be exposed with less risk? For example, your service interfaces and policies need to be shared with external parties. And those service meta data also has their own lifecycles that you need to monitor and manage closely. Sounds like SOA governance? Yes it is about Governance. Rather than managing your own SOA governance setup, what if you could use it as a service, with proper access control? If you could your CRM run with a software as a service (SaaS) model, why not leverage SOA Governance as a Service?
Piles of legacy data should not be exposed to he cloud, nor it is a good idea to move those to a SaaS model. However, the need to integrate and grant access to trusted parties is real. So how about exposing the internal services as proxies in the cloud and still keep the real services within the intranet, with the warm safe feeling of staying home? Yes that too can be done with a Cloud Services Gateway.
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