Are enterprises at risk of making the same mistakes with Cloud Computing that they made with SOA? Funny enough, the answer could easily be yes.
Here is why (in no particular order)
Common SOA Mistake: Don’t involve the business; they will not get it
With Cloud Computing, you easily run the risk of this. Leveraging Cloud Computing must involve the business and that too early. You need the business to understand the adoption model, benefits, cost and risk. Their buy-in will be critical to the overall planning, execution and ultimate success or failure of your initiatives.
Common SOA Mistake: It is an Enterprise effort and will be a huge project
Many SOA projects failed because they were pitched or executed as a multi-year, multi-million project. Let’s not repeat that with Cloud Computing. For example, the goal of your first Cloud Computing project should not be to move your entire data center to the cloud. I think you get what I am saying – Cloud Computing should be adopted strategically, in small bits to start with. Cloud Computing is just another project… one of many in your project portfolio!
Common SOA Mistake: A single vendor or product for maximum simplicity and interoperability
In Cloud Computing, you should not restrict yourself to one vendor. Of course, you need to understand how multiple vendors will talk to each other – integrations, reporting, security etc. However, definitely adopt a multi-vendor strategy.
Common SOA Mistake: Governance is either too little or too much
I believe some Enterprises got into analysis-paralysis and over engineered their Governance policies for SOA. In other cases; they left it for later. Getting governance right and at the right level is critical to a successful Cloud Computing strategy.
We could explore this further and site a few more examples… it would be interesting and probably equally applicable to the Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) world if you treat SaaS as a sub-set of overall world of Cloud Computing.
