Although the business benefits of using Web Services are clear, it also presents numerous challenges and risks within traditional enterprise environments
Monday, February 23, 2004
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Web Service technologies are fundamentally changing the software industry,
and redefining the process by which software is developed, sold, and managed.
Web Services are also being hailed by CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs as the
next-generation vehicle for driving top line growth and controlling bottom
lines. However, simply jumping on the Web Services bandwagon won’t lead to
corporate success.
Web Services will have a significant impact on established business processes
and operations. Those companies that jump headfirst into Web Services without
first planning for these changes will fail to realize the true value of this
technology.
The anybody-to-anybody characteristic of Web Services enables new as well as
more fluid business relationships. Although the business benefits of using Web
Services are clear, this new technology also presents numerous challenges and
risks within traditional enterprise environments.
An
enterprise procurement application of a corporation using the
inventory and parts ordering Web Service of two of its
vendors. By using these Web Services, the developer of the
procurement application does not have to maintain a master
list of all vendor parts, their descriptions, and their costs.
Instead, the most up-to-date information for each part is
maintained by the vendors themselves, and this information as
well as the ability to place and track orders is simply made
available to customers through Web Services
Web Services and the Enterprise Why will IS departments that have demanded control over all aspects of
enterprise applications adopt a distributed and shared software architecture
that moves administrative control over various parts of applications outside of
the enterprise? The runtime characteristics of Web Services-based applications
will have critical dependencies upon remotely hosted and remotely managed
external businesses. This is a severe departure from the centrally controlled as
well as the guaranteed predictability and reliability that have become the
hallmarks of enterprise software and the IS departments that manage them.
Moreover, Web Services expose critical application interfaces and operations
and make them accessible through HTTP traffic. Each of these hundreds and
thousands of operations represents a potential security problem. Instead of
hiding information about how to access and use each of these operations, Web
Services publish this information via WSDL files. Additionally, since the
messaging format used by Web Services is XML, each of the data fields are
self-describing and highlight to hackers the means by which to interact with
each service.
Enterprise IS departments will find themselves in the middle, responsible for
reconciling the business benefits with the risks of adopting Web Services within
the enterprise. In an effort to gain a controlling foothold over risky and
potentially harmful Web Services traffic, IS departments will insist on
controlling with which Web Services an enterprise application can interact. A
misbehaving Web Service will simply be cut off from interacting with any
enterprise applications; such cut offs may even be pre-emptive if there is a
history of problems or a perception of a threat.
To accomplish this, IS will take on a more strategic role within enterprises
and will align itself more closely with individual business units. Business
decisions by these units, such as the partners from which to source components,
will have to be cleared by IS if those partners’ Web Services will interact
with the company’s applications.
This will have major ramifications for enterprise application architectures.
Applications will support dynamic and swappable Web Services – hardwired Web
Service invocations will no longer suffice. IS will use management environments
to deploy enterprise-wide policies for Web Services that will monitor and
strictly enforce the Web Services applications can use.
There is no doubt that the uptake of Web Services within the enterprise will
require changes. Many of these changes will be to established procedures and
existing policies that have been supported by years of experience. Nonetheless,
the potential benefits – both financial and strategic – to adopting Web
Services are sufficiently large to justify such changes.
Sandeep Chatterjee Some material in this article are from various chapters of Developing
Enterprise Web Services: An Architect’s Guide by Sandeep Chatterjee, Ph.D. and
James Webber, Ph.D., ISBN 0-13-140160-2, copyright 2004. All rights reserved.
These materials are used with permission from Prentice Hall PTR.
