Credit Crunch, Security Compliance or Service Oriented Architecture

Introducing Data Services 

Data Services are still a relative newcomer to the field of IT and are an evolution of various attempts to have one interface for multiple databases. A Data Service Platform is a set of tools used for creating, publishing and operating Data Services.

All the enterprise IT companies (Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM and so on) have a set of Data Services tools that they provide to access any data source whether it be the latest version of Oracle, an old legacy DOS database or a web-based site. These set of tools should also be able to work with any operating system platform be it Linux, Windows, UNIX or MAC.  

This doesn’t seem to be particularly exciting until you realise that every small company has at least three or four disparate databases of information to the large enterprises which will have at least fifty separate silos of information.

We can quickly count them as the HR employee database, the accounting system, the network directory database (eg active directory), asset management database, any customer relationship software, our email system, purchase ledger, stock control and so on. 

Now in these environments a Data Service initiative has many benefits including lower data management costs and compliance of financial and security information (Credit Crunch and Security). You can see how the Data Services tools work by considering Diagram 1

In Diagram 1 (see below), we have the top row which consists of a set of data consumers.