What are the challenges associated with SOA?

What are the challenges associated with SOA?

Service Oriented Architecture SOA confers obvious business benefits associated with integration and the creation of new services. However, insufficient attention to governance—the management and monitoring of services, their performance and reliability, and especially their security—can cause inefficiencies and disrupt business processes and the end users they support.

As business needs evolve, it is critical to have policies in place that help determine how to prioritize new business processes and services under consideration for implementation, who will be responsible for designing those processes, how they should be implemented, and how the success of the new implementations will be measured. This is especially important given the inherent cross-functional nature of Service Oriented Architecture SOA solutions.

Reuse of services, once touted as a primary Service Oriented Architecture SOA advantage, is really a byproduct of the approach rather than the goal itself. Reuse is also proving to be more challenging than expected. An existing service may not provide exactly what a different business process requires and so may call for additional work. And designing a service so that it can be reused in the future requires accurately predicting what future needs will be, something notoriously difficult to do.