IT must move towards managing service-oriented architectures (SOA) from a business perspective, which means that IT managers must find the tools necessary to align its goals with those of the business. Progress Actional for Continuous Service Optimization (CSO) gives IT managers the power to view business processes and transactions – and the infrastructure that supports them. Read this white paper and understand how Business Process Visibility (BPV) enables organizations to author, govern and enforce policy at the process level.

Companies with Progress Sonic ESB can enhance Sonic ESB management to ensure reliable operations across their entire SOA with Progress Actional software. Actional integrates with Sonic and provides end-to-end visibility across a Sonic ESB deployment and the infrastructure it connects. Highlights of Actional SOA management software include: * Extends operational visibility beyond the edge of Sonic ESB into connected infrastructure * Pinpoints the root cause of problems in distributed systems * Requires no change to existing ESB deployments * Incurs virtually zero operational overhead and latency

Progress Actional for Active Policy Enforcement addresses these issues while reducing IT costs. Actional decouples the SOA policy lifecycle from the service lifecycle to centralize the creation and management of SOA policy for security and compliance while ensuring distributed SOA policy enforcement. This empowers security and compliance experts to author policies once, apply them consistently across the SOA, and guarantee complete coverage for reduced risk. In addition, Actional for Active Policy Enforcement is designed to handle the full diversity of security and compliance requirements present within and beyond the boundaries of today's heterogeneous enterprises. It offers robust security across heterogeneous platforms and Web services standards—including support for WS-Security. It also simplifies compliance audits by recording audit data to a relational database, where it is available toany audit tool.

Progress Actional for SOA Operations is an SOA management tool for organizations that want a cost-effective, high-performance, scalable SOA runtime environment. It provides centralized management and end-to-end visibility into the dynamic, loosely coupled SOA environment necessitated by the move from application silos. Actional SOA Operations offers a non-invasive approach to monitoring and managing SOA operations. This is made possible through a unique Flow Mapping™ technology that provides global SOA views without much of the coding and manual configuration required by other solutions. As a result, with Actional you can better understand how services are being used and by whom, yet improve IT productivity and reduce SOA development time and costs. Actional also makes finding the root cause of policy violations, exceptions, and other service processing problems easy. Alerts are triggered by violations, automatically generating a snapshot of the actual transaction that caused the policy violation, making root cause analysis fast and accurate.

Progress Actional SOA solutions provide visibility, security, and control of the activities of services and end-to-end business processes in a runtime environment. They meet the challenges of keeping an SOA up and running successfully, in alignment with the business, and secure and compliant.

Organizations must ensure SOA security and compliance to protect their reputation and bottom line. Yet many companies tightly couple policies to the services to which they apply, putting the various IT teams responsible for the different services in charge of the related policies. This can lead to inconsistencies in policies and gaps in coverage, as well as high IT costs resulting from re-coding policies as services change and vice versa. Actional for Active Policy Enforcement is designed to handle the variety of SOA security and compliance requirements present in the extended enterprise. It provides flexible, standards-based support for authentication and authorization and integrates with a broad range of identify management and single sign-on (SSO) technologies. For compliance, it records audit data to a relational database, where it is available to any audit tools.

As the topology of an SOA becomes more complex, the challenge of fast, easy route cause analysis of any underlying IT infrastructure processing problems increases. Service performance and availability issues often appear in systems that may be upstream from the root cause. Full diagnostics require a roadmap of the problematic SOA transaction to address the issue and expedite problem resolution. Progress® Actional® for SOA Operations makes finding the root cause of exceptions, violations of business policies such as service-level agreements (SLAs), and other processing problems easy. When violations occur, along with sending an alert, Actional's Flow Mapping™ technology creates a flow map of the end-to-end problematic transaction.

To optimize their SOA investment and accomplish SOA business goals such as increasing business agility, organizations are turning to SOA governance. An effective SOA governance strategy must not only ensure that the behavior of project development teams is in-line with corporate goals; it also must address security and compliance issues that arise from regulations and business demands such as Sarbanes-Oxley, MIFID, and Visa PCI, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. And, finally, it must control rogue services. The Progress Actional product family complements governance tools such as registries and repositories and provides organizations with comprehensive runtime SOA governance capabilities from monitoring SOA operations, to improving business outcomes, to ensuring enforcement of security, compliance, and business policies and controlling rogue services.