Operational Governance - Run Services Right

Operational Governance controls the runtime aspects of SOA, making sure that services are behaving correctly.  It typically includes service monitoring, security and management with a runtime policy system.  Most Web Services Management and Web Services Security vendors now position themselves as providing Operational Governance solutions.

The Operational Governance solution relies heavily on the Policy Governance solution for discovery of policies for implementation and enforcement.  A well architected Operational Governance solution will fully abstract service consumers and providers from the complexity of policy implementation and enforcement, service endpoint location, transport, standards, message exchange pattern, and other impedances to interoperability.  It should provide agents, delegates, and a network resident intermediary for service virtualization.

In a unified governance environment, services governed by an operational governance solution will first have progressed through Planning Governance and Development Governance processes, although in many cases organizations will have many existing services that have not been subject to governance processes and now must be managed and secured and brought under governance.

SOA Software’s Service Manager™ is the industry’s leading SOA management and security product. It follows the SOA Infrastructure Reference Model delivering comprehensive standards-based security, routing, mediation, monitoring, and management for SOA and Web services.  It is the industry’s most scalable and high performance SOA infrastructure product.

Service Manager is deployed together with Policy Manager™ providing the industry’s broadest and deepest SOA Management and SOA Security solution.  It implements and enforces policies from Policy Manager, and generates usage, performance and policy compliance metrics that it reports to Policy Manager to enable a closed-loop process for auditing that policies are being correctly enforced.