Centralizing Control and Management of Enterprise Data Because SOA is a cross-enterprise solution it is often where organizations centralize control and management of enterprise data.  If the goal is to master the role of data integration in SOA development, these are among the key areas to consider: 

 

Deploying Data Integration as a Service:

By managing data integration this way, you can take a service-oriented view of data and delegate the right tools for working with the data at the most efficient
layer.  In many organizations, there have been separate tools, and vendors, for different data-related functions.  There might be one vendor providing tools for ETL(extraction, transformation and loading), another for warehousing, another for business process analytics.  By decoupling data integration from applications and from the SOA, you can create a single unified way of handling data-related functions.

Creating a Common Technical Platform:

Open standards are critical and it is also critical that there be a common platform for dealing with master data, query-level access for data virtualization, data quality enhancements, or data quality improvements.  By deploying open standards you can enable data integration solutions to interoperate in both providing and consuming services throughout the entire SOA stack.

Focusing on Data-Centric SOA Operations:

Among the key considerations would be data service patterns, master data, data virtualization, batch data, data quality services, data event services and data access services.  The solution should reconcile disparate semantic definitions in different applications and databases while ensuring data quality and consistency across systems.  You want data integration to support the ability to do applications migration across enterprise-wide applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Process Management (BPM), among others.

Building an End-to-End Approach:

One of the more recent options available to enterprises is to turn to a single vendor for a comprehensive end-to-end data integration platform that connects data sources from heterogeneous environments and applications and enables the delivery and management of accurate and timely data across the enterprise.  This type of approach allows organizations to manage data integration in the bulk delivery tier, the business process tier and the application tier, expediting and enabling the delivery of services through the SOA framework.  By taking an end-to-end approach organizations can use one vendor for all of their needs, which will help to reduce development costs, improve the speed of handling data, reduce process execution times and lower the total cost of ownership across the SOA enterprise.

One of the opportunities of SOA is to reduce IT complexity and improve business agility. Unfortunately, the growth of data throughout the organization and the rise of database sprawl has only made things more challenging and in-creased the complexity of rolling out new applications and services. SOA can provide a long-term solution to these.