Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step ...

Information-as-a-Service 43
the right approach to security for your SOA and the right security technology.
You need to work closely with your database-as-a-service provider and
consider your own requirements to determine the best approach to secure
your database.
Third, many of the interfaces offered by database-as-a-service providers
are proprietary in nature and thus can be difficult to leverage from applications
that need to access the data. While many cloud computing providers
are moving toward standard interfaces, you need to understand and test their
interfaces and/or APIs.
Finally, some database-as-a-service providers offer only a subset of the
capabilities found in traditional on-premise enterprise databases. You may
find that you are missing features and functions required by the enterprise
applications. For example, stored procedures and triggers may not be supported
in the same manner as in on-premise databases, or they may be proprietary,
and thus difficult to port if you need to move off the database-as-aservice
provider at some point in the future.
Information-as-a-Service
Information-as-a-service refers to the ability to consume any type of remotely
hosted information—stock price information, address validation, credit reporting,
for example—through a well-defined interface such as an API (see
Figure 3.4). Over a thousand sources of information can be found these days,
most of them listed at www.programmableweb.com. While they typically
“serve up” information using standard Web Services APIs, some use proprietary
interfaces. Therefore, as you must for database-as-a-service, you need to
consider the interfaces offered by information-as-a-service providers.
Typically, APIs function like this:
or
GetSSNName(SSN_Number);
GetSSNName(333-33-3333);
with the return of
"John H. Smith"