Advantages and disadvantages of adopting SOA in an Organization

The advantages of a service oriented architecture

Service Oriented Architecture, commonly referred to as SOA, is a leading architectural practice followed by organizations to reduce total cost of ownership, ease of maintenance in software development. Many organizations today are looking up to SOA as an architectural solution to provide a robust computing platform to connect to legacy systems. In this architectural paradigm there is focus on exposing software as a service rather than an application. With the following distinct advantages:

*Reusability*
In SOA an organization clearly demarcates its business process in terms of a web service. For example, a bank may expose a web service called openaccountNumber() to the outside world for  opening an account. This web service can be used anywhere across the globe for opening bank accounts. You need not  write separate applications for the same business function.
*Ease of Maintenance*
Organizations can maintain the web services at a lower cost as compared to the separate applications.
*Reduced Development Cost *
With this as a architectural standard and many IDE’s in marketplace it is easier and cost effective to develop web services on SOA pattern
*Maintainability*
SOA promises to be great in terms of maintainability of code as web services can be put in repository and located according to geographical and business purposes.
*Total Cost of  Ownership*
Umbrella term used to denote the costs involved in maintaining  supporting, and owning, governing applications throughout the organizations.
*Interoperability*
SOA architectural solutions promises organizations to interoperate the various businesses exposed as webservices that will allow the organizations to interoperate as in a webservice to getCustomerdeatils() can be used by other departments, say Home loan line of credit, can issue a request to the customer details. Similarly the Credit online system may use the same web service to get the customer details .
*Standards*
SOA brings in standards to the organization. A web service built on SOA rigidly follows W3C standards for data interchange and exposing the wsdl to the outside world.
SOA has also standardized the way web services operate and in terms of data exchange and interaction with backend systems. SOA has been incorporated by many banks as standard for developing web applications across the world, SOA advantages come with the disadvantages of a large cost involved in transitioning legacy systems to new SOA based solutions as lot  of research is done on the previous system data formats and business significance before migrating on to SOA based solution.SOA based solutions promise a much better landscape in terms of all the benefits mentioned above and has proven be boon to large scale organizations .