There's been a great deal written about the benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- some of it real and some of it hype -- about how adopting SOAs can make a business more nimble by improving IT system flexibility and cutting costs through the reuse of software services. So when a press release from Progress Software with "rogue services" and "silent killer" at the top popped into my e-mail this week, I couldn't resist a look.
The basic idea is that SOA is great -- assuming a company's IT management is in full control of the SOA environment. But bad things can happen when SOA systems aren't centrally monitored and managed. Developers throughout a company can create unauthorized Web services that tap into an SOA system, and that can lead to all kinds of nasty surprises.
