Is distributed governance a redundant phrase?
Posted by Jeff Papows on Tue, Dec 15, 2009 @ 08:45 AM
David Linthicum's Cloud Computing blog over at Infoworld makes solid points about SOA governance's move into the clouds. As I've addressed in my November 18 post, "Governance: a cloud computing strategy's silver lining", the key to building a seamless enterprise architecture is through governance.
The guiding principles of SOA and all out efforts to break down the silos we've inadvertently created over the years has led us to a point where governance can no longer be an afterthought as it is in so many instances. As more applications and services are opened up to a greater amount of users - many of whom may not have been anticipated when the original architecture was being sketched - there needs to be a more concerted focus on the way governance is introduced and carried throughout the software development life cycle.
This is most evident in a company's decision to solely focus on a run-time governance approach. Now there are certainly places where runtime governance is most relevant and necessary - to gain better control of the runtime environment - and when it's equally critical to enforce governance at the very beginning design stage. While each approach, runtime and design time, brings value to the architecture and are complementary to each other, what is becoming most relevant and critical as companies move to cloud computing is the distributed governance model.
To this end, WebLayers announced in July the industry's first fully distributed policy management platform. As more companies start to roll out products in this arena, I suspect that we may no longer be differentiating between distributed governance and non-distributed governance. It will simply be that distributed governance will be the de facto approach due to the fact that nearly all architectures will be distributed to some degree as we continue to extend our applications and services to other departments and divisions as well as external customers and partners.
photo by pink princess