Implementing Cloud as the Centerpoint of Federation
Posted by Aaron Goldberg on March 15, 2011
One of the most under-discussed trends in all of Information Technology is the fundamental shift away from IT focused inside of an organization, to an integrated, Federated style of business process support that includes partners, customers, suppliers, and any allied person or organization.
The changes that have enabled this movement are obvious: pooling information is essential, removing the barriers to sharing key information speeds up business and lowers costs, and linking information from these sources shortens the business cycle substantially. And the IT processes to support this integration were developed and brought to market.
However, one of the primary pitfalls of nearly all current solutions, including many cloud implementations, is that the interface between entities is too narrow, too limited, and requires far too many resources to implement and manage. One might even argue that little has changed from the 1980’s when Reynolds & Reynolds hard-coded one of the first shared inventory systems between automobile manufacturers and their dealers.
The Cloud buzz has brought a renewed interest in bringing Federation to an even higher level of understanding and utilization. And the Cloud does an excellent job of handling some of the very important infrastructure issues that bedeviled earlier implementations.
Among the most important of these are:
- Insuring network ubiquity and performance: Building the infrastructure to link disparate entities has always involved a substantial amount of cost and IT resource. Using pre-existing Cloud solutions allows the Federation to focus on the more important issues
- Server and storage loading and build-out: This has always been a big problem. Who gets to make the expensive data center additions? Can one entity support the capital expense for a long term chargeback to the partners? A lot of accounting and dubious financial planning ensued. PaaS (platform-as-a-service) eliminates that aspect.
However, if we merely use the Cloud as a more financially attractive way to handle network and computing resources, then we really haven’t changed the game, we’ve just taken one piece and made it more efficient. The real cost area remains.
What true Cloud Integration really offers, and what makes it truly exciting, is moving beyond a facility for hard-coded interaction, into a much more robust environment, where the Cloud provides an essentially open framework, open to any application, data type, web service, or business process. In this scenario, the integration can happen at a higher level that does not require the Federated entities to meet some arbitrary and low level interface standard.
The best way to describe this is that the Cloud works with the applications, data structures, and business process aspects as they currently exist, using a Cloud-based engine for driving the merger, mediation and interaction of this data without costly and time consuming one-off integration.
There are two very important realities that will drive this approach:
1. Flexibility is Key! – The more that is hard coded or interface bound, the less ability the Federation has to incorporate and execute changes and modifications that may be needed. Changes that are costly, time consuming and which involve a super challenging approval process just won’t work.
2. Federated Entities Cannot Change Current Process to Join – The power of the network is driven by its size. You want your Federations to include all the appropriate entities; however, if you force each entity to replace current software or add new software, the network just won’t grow. Cloud based integration embraces all entities.
The Cloud provides us with the means to support the Federated reality that faces nearly every organization. To maximize the value of these Federations, it’s essential to not just leverage the Cloud as a Platform, but as an integration entity as well.
Tags: Aaron Goldberg, Cloud Computing, Cloud-based Integration, Federated Architecture, Federated Integration, PaaS
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