Information as a Service
What is information as a service?
Information as a Service
(IaaS) is part of our service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach. In our SOA Reference Architecture diagram, this is the Information Services block. This is the part of an SOA that provides information on demand.
The idea is that in an SOA, composite applications need access to data just like any other apps. To the extent that just means using JDBC to access a database, that's the same old stuff. But there's also the opportunity to develop a set of services for accessing a set of data, which separates you from where that data is stored, how it's formatted, and so on.
A good example is the way many companies store the info for a single customer in several different databases, because different apps want their own customer attributes and because they all want local access to the customer from the local database they manage. Such spread out, duplicated data makes it a real challenge to create, delete, or update a customer. So one approach is to define a customer management service, with operations that do stuff like create, delete, and update (but probably in a more business-oriented way). Expose that service on an ESB, and you can invoke it from anywhere, it'll run anywhere it's hosted, and it'll do whatever steps are necessary (whether that's two steps or 200) to read or update the databases. If tomorrow you add another database, modify the service to access that database as well and the service consumers never need to know the difference.
Customer records are an example of what we call master data management, which maintains the core set of data practically all of an enterprise's applications depend on.
Some sources for more info:
(Original blog posting)
