Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

6.16. VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL POLICY ENFORCEMENT

Another compelling and complex issue with a unified policy model is the vertical and horizontal enforcement of policies across the enterprise. Vertical policy enforcement refers to multi-level policies that involve integrating governance enforcement processes vertically to enforce a given policy. Reuse is an example of such a policy, where it is enforced during enterprise planning and project approval processes, as well as during service design and service portfolio management.

Horizontal enforcement of policies occurs when a given policy or group of policies are enforced through horizontally integrated governance processes. An example of this is the enforcement of service design and technical policies across the SDLC, from services modeling, design, and construction to quality assurance and testing, run time and operations.

Ultimately, the policy model you enforce is a decomposition of enterprise business polices into fine-grained technical policies and automated policies. The decomposition leads to enforceable policies that can be deployed or provisioned to various runtime tools for automated enforcement, or they can be issued to governance boards or invoked by governance processes for enforcement manually.