Introduction
Nearly every enterprise today is affected by globalization, outsourcing, private equity competition, increased regulation, Web 2.0 or all of the above, placing increased demands on enterprise computing requirements. To survive and prosper, companies must reduce operating costs, increase automation and control, and prepare to scale the number of business relationships they can support.
The platform to facilitate this transformation is common across the enterprise – the network. The transport-centric vision of the network is now giving way to a converged vision in which business objectives and network architecture meet. But what does this really mean?
Agility and efficiency are no longer a matter of building solutions to support a specific business model. Rather, the ability to rapidly evolve to support innovation in business models must be part of the enterprise architecture strategy from the beginning of business process change. A service-oriented network architecture (SONA) can create a platform that enables change and accelerates business value. The SONA framework was developed by Cisco® and is being used successfully within its own IT organization and by many of its customers to align business goals with enterprise architecture.
The Transformation Process
Everything starts with enterprise architecture, the global plan for how all processes in a company will be implemented. But many enterprise architecture initiatives fail to engage the business. A successful transformation using a SONA framework addresses both processes and business goals:
- The business context is created, providing the foundational assumptions for the future-state architecture.
- Strategic requirements are analyzed, while articulating a set of architecture principles.
- Key business functions to fulfil the business strategy are evaluated.
As these requirements are articulated, enterprise architecture teams can identify the IT services that support the business functions and processes needed to achieve the business strategy.
As technology influences – including Web 2.0 and service oriented applications – gain momentum, companies realize that traditional definitions of enterprise architecture are too small to contain the scope of the solution. Many of the services that are crucial in these implementations find their natural home in the network, not in the application.
Supporting these new technologies requires that network architecture become part of the design process, not just an invisible transport layer. If business transformation is not supported by the right network design, the efforts will most likely not deliver on performance requirements.
The Network in a Service Oriented World
The architectural complexity of the information highway is changing dramatically – from a simple two-lane road connected by switches and routers to one with a much more complex structure, featuring a variety of special-purpose checkpoints along the way.
Checkpoints include well-established functions such as firewalls and encryption functionality like Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). But upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that many common services for security and identity management work identically in every application, making them perfect candidates to be provisioned in the network.
The core functions of many types of applications (GRC, in particular) can be enhanced by adding checkpoints that look inside the packets flowing through the network and recognize important events, which are then sent to applications. Radio frequency identification (RFID) and other real-world awareness services that report on the location of people and things feed their information into a network, where it is consumed by applications that need it. Virtualization allows one point on a network to imitate many different devices and services.
Yet, in the face of all of these demands and opportunities, the shape of the network architecture has changed very little. In spite of bigger pathways and more complicated topology, loading more packet volume and IP-based services on today’s network will eventually lead to a traffic jam and prevent enterprises from cost-effective transformations.
Which Types of Applications as Services?
Enterprise systems today can improve their performance using a feedback loop based on data collected or through other means such as location-based services. Services that capture events are particularly important and are ideally suited to move into the network. In an extended event-driven business network, a supply chain event indicating a primary material shortage might have tremendous downstream implications. But it is useless unless that event is communicated to all the networks and people that need to be aware of it.
The services used in these contexts must have the operational characteristics of production systems to succeed. Many of the most valuable services are extensions of core systems at the hub of the enterprise, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM).
As hub systems become available through services in ways that protect the transactional integrity of the data, the value of these systems extends to the edge of the enterprise where the information may be used in looser, more collaborative processes.
Which Services in the Network
What does it mean, exactly, for services to migrate to the network? Essentially, it means that code that was running in an application server now runs on routers, switches and other special-purpose devices used to run and manage the network.
This gives applications a simpler architecture and extended reach. Applications can siphon functions that are better performed by network-based services and gain enhanced functionality by network services that recognize important events and feed them to the applications. Applications remain the brain; the network becomes an extended nervous system.
The network is the natural platform for a certain class of generic services for unified communications, authentication, virtualization, mobility and voice. Because the network is the only ubiquitous component in the IT landscape, it is the natural home for the most generic services. Services likely to migrate into the network include backup, identity management, location-based services, caching and GRC-related events, which are all generic and operate in the same way regardless of the application context. Provisioning services that are used by every application in the same way from the network is less costly, faster and easier, and is the only way to help ensure consistency and compliance.
The network is also the natural platform for collaboration-related services that provide location awareness, instant messaging, telepresence and voice conferencing. For example, such services would allow a hospital to deliver a multi-gigabyte digital X-ray image to the reader closest to a doctor who is location-aware to the network. The same intelligence could avoid delivering such a large file over a less optimal network location if the doctor were using a mobile device.
Architectural Implications
One major implication of providing these services through the network is a convergence of enterprise architectures and network architectures. Moving services into the network requires tight coordination of business planning, enterprise architecture and network architecture. Organizations must examine architecting the network to the business strategy before moving to the provisioning phases.
Network topology will be influenced and network device capacities and capabilities must change as they are asked to do more. There must be an optimal number of points for information collection to recognize and capture application-oriented events and deliver other services. Each collection point must have appropriate access to traffic and processing capability.
To create such a platform means examining networks that were designed sometimes decades ago and then incrementally enhanced. A vision will be required, followed by a roadmap to achieve that vision. The two most likely first steps after establishing the vision involve network provisioning of event recognition for applications as described earlier, and security.
Traditional network security functions such as firewalls, SSL encryption, and virtual private networks (VPNs), along with newer message-level and application-level security and reducing unwanted traffic provide an example of how services can migrate to the network for added functionality and cost savings.
Security and Web 2.0
As companies pursue Web 2.0 business models and implement Web services-based application programming interfaces (APIs), fresh security challenges arise that require a more flexible, responsive architecture. Web services that enable e-commerce transactions or update supply chain information carry significant security risks. Misuse of these services can be incredibly damaging and the protection provided by the network and other security mechanisms must be an order of magnitude more robust than before.
Crafting a SONA
Applications can be made immensely more effective using Cisco’s SONA framework. When generic services are migrated to the network, along with specialized services for location or unified communications, the character of an IT infrastructure changes and becomes more flexible and supple.
As more and more services are added to the IP network, however, network architecture and capacity planning become more complex than just adding “more network.” For example, prioritization must be available for voice packets within the IP stream. And while security, identity management and similar services might have predictable growth curves, data centres supporting various virtualized services may face extremely irregular growth patterns.
Application-oriented networking and virtualization add their own requirements for topology. Melding the network with enterprise architecture makes getting to the right architecture for network-based services more difficult still. A successful approach to implementing a SONA framework is an incremental journey of several coordinated steps. Pursuing a business strategy without incorporating network centric principles at the origination of the idea may cause business value to be lost in the vast functional potential.
Value of Getting It Right from the Start
The primary benefit of identifying enterprise architecture strategies early in the IT planning process is the ability to create more business value to keep pace with the ever-changing global marketplace. It requires working closely with valued technology partners well versed in the implementation of service-oriented networks and applications, which will help accelerate business value creation by: increasing internal process flexibility; reducing costs through standardization; fostering innovation inside and outside a company; improving the value created by enterprise applications; and boosting adoption of Web 2.0-enabled business models.
Who Stands to Gain from SONA?
As with any significant technology shift, companies embrace new concepts and ways of doing business differently. Forward-thinking organizations will recognize the benefits of constructing a SONA to harness the benefits of Web 2.0 and other emerging technologies, and will more quickly reap the benefits when compared to their more cautious competitors. Companies that move quickly to prepare a scalable and robust infrastructure for service delivery inside and outside the firewall stand to increase business value and gain competitive advantage. The entire foundation of this new wave of business value is reliable, manageable and operationally robust dynamic services, which can only be delivered by the strategically architected network.
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