Learn about the role advanced network services can play in the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) framework.
Enterprise architectures, the IT frameworks that govern the alignment between business and technology architectures, come in a range of styles. For example, the pioneering "Zachman framework" emphasizes classification and assignment of artifacts. TOGAF, a widely used architecture developed by The Open Group, lays out a process for moving from generic values to industry-specific ones and then organization-specific structures through a repeatable cycle of steps.
Enterprise architectures vary widely on the basis of differing views of the relationship between the business and its IT resources, differing problems the organization must solve, and historical and technological factors. The architectural methodology that an organization creates, adopts, or tailors reveals a great deal about that organization's underlying values.
Often the gaps between an architectural vision and its specific technological enablers are wide, but they can be bridged by examining the values captured in the architecture and looking at how technologies support them.
This paper performs that exercise on the sprawling, ambitious Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) and some of the technologies that can be used to realize its goals. Specifically, it focuses on the significant but underrecognized role of network-based services.
Network services are assuming a variety of processing-intensive functions that can hamper and complicate architected applications. Just as important, network services offer unique capabilities that can enrich innovative composite applications. Architects who work with FEA will be interested to see how well network services match FEA's needs, approaches, and values.
This paper gives a brief overview of FEA contents, a distillation of FEA's underlying values and goals, and a survey of some of the relevant services provided by Cisco.
