WE LIVE in the age when processing power is cheaper and more potent, storage is a commodity rather than an asset, and digital communication is readily available. On the other hand, applications have become increasingly complex and more demanding.

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Andrei Migatchev - Chief Technology Officer at Magix Integration." />With the ability of applications to work together to fulfi l complex business processes, software isolation and centralisation is no longer the most attractive path. Distribution of applications across functional domains allows organisations to achieve far more efficacy and efficiency. The next level of this  distribution of computing resources is cloud computing, which more and more software vendors provide as a service to organisations.

This not only allows utilisation of the distributed nature of these clouds, but also moves the burden of support and maintenance of data centres to the vendor. To combat the low bandwidth of wide area networks and client connectivity to the Internet, only the presentation layer is rendered on the client devices. All the actual processing happens on the servers in the cloud, which are able to communicate among each other at much higher speeds and exchange data far more efficiently.

But how does this impact the integration strategy of an organisation?

I believe we’re still far off from deploying complete enterprise applications in the cloud, never mind  running all the organisation’s software assets in the cloud. The solution I will advocate here is for an
organisation to deploy its own services, which require being available for the external parties or remote access, to the public cloud and, for the rest, start creating private clouds within the local networks, which will service internal business processes and staff.

An organisation’s private cloud follows the same rules as the public cloud. However, it is hosted on the
internal network which provides faster access to the vital business applications, but also allows a standardised distribution of application services across multiple data centres. Creation of private
clouds will allow for a more standardised and managed approach to application deployment and maintenance.

However, taking service-enabled applications to the cloud, whether private or public, poses certain
challenges: size of transmitted messages, transaction frequency and location of the services play a role when orchestrating a solution for the business process automation. Further considerations that would impact the architecture are: type of data exchange, acceptable lag, and transaction mode of the  information exchange.

All of these considerations require additional abilities of an enterprise service bus over and above those
discussed in the previous article. These abilities would include compression of the messages  transmitted over the wide area network, fault tolerance and retransmissions, ability to handle network errors, and assuring delivery of the message to the target site.

Location awareness can further enhance a middleware platform whereby intelligence is built into the service bus which identifi es and routes the messages to the correct site based on the content of data.
Redundancy and disaster recovery is another consideration. The standard approach of a centralised application deployment will not work here, since the same application may be running at several sites or have its modules distributed among various locations.

To conclude this brief discussion on integration in the cloud, I want to stress once again that designing  and deploying SOA within an organisation requires a phased and iterative approach. This starts with careful planning and analysis, and continues to deployment of a suitable service bus within an  organisation, then follows to a steady service-enablement of existing and new applications.

Creating private clouds, deploying services to these and utilising public clouds are the next steps in the process.