Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

6.15. MULTI-LEVEL OR MULTI-TIERED POLICIES

Multi-level SOA policies are interesting and challenging. As described above, security policies can be defined and enforced as business policies, process policies, technical service design policies, as well as runtime policies. A multi-level policy such as this requires a model for associating the business policy as a parent policy to potential child policies that are essentially more fine-grained derivative policy assertions.

Reuse is another multi-level policy that is common for SOA initiatives. Recall the concept of a governance thread from Chapter 4. A reuse policy will be enforced at multiple levels and across multiple processes in your enterprise. We proposed the concept of a governance thread as a mechanism to link related governance processes together in order to enforce a policy at multiple levels and across multiple governance processes in an enterprise.