Integrated Secure's strives to help clients maximize the value of their net-centric architectures. Our staff consists of certified systems architects with many years of experience implementing complex applications for both corporate and government initiatives.

Governance and Process Analysis and Planning

Historically, most environments supporting net-centric services have some mix of process and governance, but it is often not implemented appropriately. Net-centric services need the correct level of governance and oversight, or else successful SOA and related adoption will not take place. Sometimes it’s a matter of degree. Too much governance means the rules to both providers and consumers are burdensome creating a very high “barrier to entry”, which discourages participation. Without participation, the net-centric service infrastructure sits unused.

Similarly, if there is an absence of governance and oversight guiding adoption, resources will remain unused. For instance, if there are misunderstandings or un-reconciled issues for a service level agreement (SLA) against a service, such as why it has intermittent availability, or why a resource has suddenly and unexpectedly ceased operating for a consumer, users will grow discouraged and adoption will stop.

At Integrated Secure, we are experts at evaluating how your organization should best plan for implementing new (or improve upon existing) net-centric governance and related process. We will analyze your particular environment; evaluate it against our Context-Level framework, and make appropriate recommendations.

Organizational Analysis and Planning

Organizational differences have historically created an impediment to net-centric services adoption. For instance, if “buy-in” to SOA and related capability is missing because of a lack of organizational incentive or commitment, then SOA adoption will not be successful.

Even when a certain level of SOA adoption has become successful, further adoption is often hampered by organizational impediments. As an example, an enterprise may attempt to co-opt an organization’s application infrastructure in order to realize its goals, putting it in direct conflict the host organization.

Integrated Secure will analyze your company and determine where best it fits within the Context Level framework, as it relates to organizational structure, and make recommendations accordingly. Integrated Secure has experience with all types of organizations, enterprises, and federations.

Communication Analysis and Planning

At its core, SOA and net-centric services success depends upon sharing of software resources across an organization, enterprise, or federation. However, adoption cannot be successful without agreement and education as to what SOA and net-centric services mean to your organization, as well as what are the appropriate goals for adoption for your particular organization. To that end, communication is crucial to educating the organization as to “what SOA is”, and how best to define and follow up on goals appropriate for your organization.

Integrated Secure will analyze your organization and evaluate how it fits into our overall Context Level framework, and define a communication plan best suited to your environment.

Technology Analysis and Planning

A common misunderstanding of net-centric services and SOA, particularly among SOA COTS customers, has been that once the “SOA tools” are installed, the promises of SOA will instantly materialize. This simply is not the case. There is a substantial amount of analysis, planning, and integration that must be done with the tools just to begin to realize the promise of sharing data and behavior.

Some of this misunderstanding can be laid at the feet of the SOA COTS vendors. The vendors are experts at selling their technology as”SOA in a box”. Their sales pitch can usually be boiled down to: “all you have to do is install the software and your SOA will be up and running.” As a consequence of misunderstanding the limitations of SOA technology, and not recognizing that success requires more than some installation and configuration, SOA implementations often go underutilized.

At Integrated Secure, we have years of net-centric system design, implementation, and integration experience, both with custom solutions we have built as well integration of SOA and other related COTS tools. More importantly, we are experts at determining the actual capabilities of a COTs tool versus what is advertised. After making that determination, we can write the custom capabilities to fill any gaps in in required capability.

Service Enablement Analysis and Planning

Service enablement is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. To be successful, service enablement must be the appropriate scope, scale, and complexity for your organization. For example, with a smaller organization, design and development approaches are comparatively consistent and well-understood, and often times more technical complexity and risk can be taken on due to the intimate nature of the organization.

As the organizational scale increases (e.g., enterprise scale or federated scale) however, the technology landscape becomes more heterogeneous and technical skill sets and experience across that landscape will vary considerably. In these circumstances, less technical risk and complexity should be undertaken to ensure that all participating organizations work effectively together to realize successful service enablement delivery and support.

At Integrated Secure, we have a great deal of respect for recognizing the importance of these differences when pursuing service enablement in an organization. Further, we have a great deal of experience in working all the these types of organizational environments, and thus are in an outstanding position to perform service enablement analysis and planning for your particular organization.

Data Federation/Virtualization Analysis and Planning

Net-centric services have become an important way for taking the enterprise and federations to the next level of application reuse and enterprise data exploitation. They address many of the limitations of J2EE and application servers, with regard to application reuse and information sharing. However, net-centric services have a related responsibility to address in the area of data integration, and one cannot take on net-centric service and SOA initiatives without examining the related data challenges.

Because SOA creates a new software layer that sits above the core systems and applications and because SOA draws data from many source data stores, there are numerous data integration, system scaling, and performance challenges regarding the data access that must be overcome.

In the last several years, data technology improvements in the arena of data virtualization have been created, in part, to address the data challenges inherent with SOA environments. Data virtualization borrows from many of the older data management concepts such as replication, pooling, and disk management, and virtualizes the capability at a new level of abstraction above the source data stores.

At Integrated Secure, we are experts at recognizing that data integration services and net-centric service delivery must be addressed simultaneously. We will therefore analyze your SOA and related net-centric service goals, and come up with a data federation/virtualization plan that will be appropriate for your organization’s needs.

Service Enablement Solutions

At its core, SOA success depends intrinsically upon sharing of software resources across an organization, enterprise, or federation. However, all the fancy SOA plumbing in the world will not translate into success without experienced SOA architects and developers delivering the solution.

At Integrated Secure we know at the outset the importance of a solution based on fundamental core components. At a minimum, these core components include a separate design-time and run-time data infrastructure, the design-time registration of service definitions as well as the related maintenance and management of separate shared service registry, and the creation of service quality monitoring and reporting against the run-time service environment.

Integrated Secure has many years of experience in the architecture, design, and development of enterprise SOA systems. Integrated Secure is currently engaged in multiple projects architecting and implementing both enterprise and federated Government clients.

Data Federation Solutions

As SOA infrastructures are required to scale to enterprise levels or greater, the data challenges to support these infrastructures grow as well. Fortunately, there are now complementary data virtualization middleware platforms that help mitigate these data challenges.

In the area of data integration, virtual (logical) data stores can be created between one or more source data stores and the SOA services, with a single management interface to maintain the mappings between the virtual and physical instances. Since the service only needs to know about the virtual stores, the actual data can be moved or replicated to another physical location without affecting the operation of related services.

System performance is another area that can become a challenge in SOA infrastructures, because of the additional software layer(s) and network load required to support its services. Data virtualization middleware can address these challenges through configurable data caching mechanisms. This has the dual advantage of ensuring service SLAs are met, while protecting the performance of the underlying physical data stores.

At Integrated Secure, we have considerable experience both recognizing when a net-centric service deployment necessitates new data management strategies (such as those mentioned above), and selecting, installing, and configuring the most appropriate solution for the given situation.

Real-Time Enterprise Data Infrastructure Solutions

In today’s enterprise environments, the value of business intelligence is often dependent on real-time data sharing. However, the more remote the service interface is from the source data store (often the case with SOA), the less the likelihood that the data can be provided in a real-time fashion.

Integrated Secure has the expertise to deliver and deploy net-centric solutions that address these real-time data sharing challenges. We can provide solutions that support real-time data infrastructure via data mechanisms that directly transfer data changes from operational data stores to the downstream services that need them. The type of data changes that must be responded to in real-time can be made available from custom solutions as well as certain middleware platforms. Either way, real-time response can be tailored to the specific needs of services on a case-by-case basis.