IT Complexity
The trade-off for providing agility and greater resource utilisation is the increased complexity of the IT infrastructure. One effect of the move to SOA is to break down application silos into a set of services that can be combined in bespoke ways to build applications. This makes it easier to construct applications that share both services and data. The illustration below shows how extra value can be extracted from enterprise data by integrating two, previously separate, data resources.
However, as a result, data sharing is more common and its effects are harder to predict. It is much more difficult for a user to clearly understand the behaviour of a dynamically evolving IT infrastructure. This can result in severe problems, particularly if the data resources were originally designed to be accessed within a siloed environment, or if the subtleties of shared access were overlooked in the design of the infrastructure. For example, if there is a hardware failure then it may no longer be clear which applications are affected, nor how they can be recovered. In a siloed environment that is manually managed, applications affected by hardware failure can be clearly identified as they are bound to particular hardware resources. This is not the case with an agile infrastructure.
The move towards greater agility can therefore produce problems in the enterprise’s IT infrastructure. Whilst it increases data sharing, it can also lead to a loss of knowledge and therefore control over the degree and nature of the sharing that is taking place. This exposes the enterprise to a number of risks.