So You Want to Run Your Business in the Cloud? What About Integration?

Ellyn Phenea rightly points out the difficulties of an integrated view of IT systems for organizations relying on software-as-a-service (SAAS).

As small and midsize businesses (SMBs) leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) to scale more quickly, they can end up with disparate applications that do not integrate. This gives rise to security issues as companies will bypass security protocols governing these software, and result in data residing in silos in different cloud services.

It seems to be true that IT policies around governance and identity management could become harder to enforce in a dispirit environment, where differing vendors supply back-office solutions. But careful planning with an eye towards security can avoid this pitfall. For example, maintaining control over the central user identity credentials -- in an LDAP or Active Directory -- goes a long way towards maintaining vigilance. For many, their FaceBook account is the easiest way to log into Internet-provided services.
Authorization and access are the first station stops on the journey to SOA. Instituting An OpenID or other solution can give users a similar experience, but sometime revocable policies are difficult to propagate. Read more about this concept here.
Data sharing becomes easier when the SAAS solutions you choose have web services APIs to "open the door" to accessing information. While one could consider a simple solution to "publish" data from one service (perhaps via Atom, RSS or some other XML format), real application integration requires a lot more than data mapping. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be more readily realized when you implement such as content-based routing, process flow control, exception handling, and messaging. Finding SAAS offerings that provide such tools can be challenging, but worth the effort, to help you avoid the need to understand complex APIs when developing web services. Look to deploy into cloud offerings with SOAP or REST interfaces, so you can link systems across the Internet. Open data storage is the next stop on the journey to SOA in the cloud, and many options are available to accommodate large or small data sets.
Security and Integration are achievable with SAAS, because many offerings are designed with SOA in mind.
- Posted by Tom/Bluedog