Web services and underlying service oriented architectures (SOAs) offer organizations a heretofore unattainable capacity to capture information from disparate information resources by directly representing and linking these assets, making them available selectively across their information systems environments.
Given their scale, scope and complexity, these technologies require significant investment and well-coordinated, cross-departmental collaboration, training and education efforts before organizations can reap the potential rewards.
The good news is that a growing host of vendors and service providers offer performance, fault and security monitoring and management software tools for SOA and Web services, based on industry standards.