If there were ever a technology that seemed tailored to the needs of government, it’s service-oriented architecture. With thousands of disparate systems needing to share information across organizational boundaries—particularly homeland security information—SOA offers agencies an attractive shortcut to their data-sharing goals. SOA is a method by which organizations can share the data within (and the business logic of) their applications with other applications, either within the same organization or across divisions, by publishing them as Web services. Because these services can use the same protocol used by Web applications (HTTP or Secure HTTP), they can also be configured for use behind the firewall or across firewalls.
