Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

6.20. BARRIERS TO A UNIFIED POLICY MODEL

Given the SOA governance landscape and the requirements for unifying approaches to governance and policy enforcement, there are a number of critical barriers to overcome in order to resolve this challenge. A few key barriers are listed below:

• Lack of industry standards for enterprise governance policies for compliance, business, process, and technical policies.

• Lack of a unified policy model that establishes an ontology and taxonomy of policies, as well as the relationships of policies to one another by category, such that enforcement can be accomplished using an integrated policy enforcement model.

• Lack of technical standards supporting a universal policy model. While Web services standards are evolving for Web services policy enforcement, there are different approaches and vendor proprietary models for network, security, and SLA and QoS policy enforcements among others.

• Lack of integrated tools that support an integrated policy enforcement model. While governance interoperability frameworks have been proposed by vendor consortia, little progress has been made to add non-Web services standards into the picture, much less integrating policy enforcement using manual and process-based enforcement concepts.

In some ways, this chapter is a call to action to address the industry standards for policy enforcement and policy management. However, in the following section we address the other gaps in policy enforcement.