Credit Crunch, Security Compliance or Service Oriented Architecture

Data Services Agility and Flexibility

Data Services toolsets have been shown to reduce development times and give you the ability to leverage your existing data assets, for instance by producing complex reports linking multiple data sources in near real time. It is this agility which is one of the most important benefits of Data Services especially within the last decade’s economic turbulence.

Companies are increasingly having to show compliance and change the way they view their data sources in shorter and shorter timelines. Data Services flexibility allows corporations to create modular components for their different data sources to create an agile architecture.

The Best Data Services Suite

I have deliberately avoided getting involved in the technicalities of SOA and Data Services as they are different for each software vendor and really wouldn’t like to comment on who has the best suite as it is still too early to say. However it is certainly worth you examining the various offerings in greater depth.

Some vendors like Microsoft even have free webcasts on the subject. One vendor, Red Hat who have also sponsored this report have taken a slightly different approach as they now provide a Data Services Platform based on Open Source technology.  

This can only be good news in an industry increasingly under attack from organised cyber criminals in that it is relatively easier for your programmers to detect Trojans and other malware within any code compared to non-open source code.

You can see the Red Hat Data Services Designer tool in action in Diagram 2 (below) aggregating information from different data sources.

You can download a variety of whitepapers from Redhat’s Data Services division here.

Ben Chai is a IT and Security consultant, analyst and writer. He currently runs incomingthought.com.