Overview
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) supports the Department of Defense (DoD), Joint Chiefs of Staff, Commanders, and the President in times of peace and war. DISA is responsible for maintaining and improving the effectiveness of the Global Information Grid (GIG), a technological foundation of the United States military. In 2002, DISA created the Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) program to provide a robust services-based infrastructure for GIG that enables the integration and delivery of real-time and near-real-time, decision-quality information to its communities of interest (COI).

At its essence, NCES is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) foundation for connecting all DoD information systems, both those that are owned by the DoD and those owned by its contractors and related agencies.

To overcome many of the NCES challenges, DISA has selected AmberPoint for Enterprise Services Management (ESM). AmberPoint provides a comprehensive infrastructure for managing and controlling distributed services-based applications, regardless of their platform, development environment, or physical location. AmberPoint not only monitors and controls the performance and reliability of SOA applications it also manages service levels, automatically handles unexpected conditions, enforces security, and manages services through the lifecycle of the system.

Providing the IT Framework for the Military of the Future
At a foundational level, NCES must provide a unified and robust infrastructure to integrate a number of critical, dynamic, heterogeneous parts. Since NCES-compliant services are owned by many agencies, DISA required the ability to monitor and control system functionality even for services they did not directly control.

If a request is made that requires the interaction of many different services owned by a number of different agencies within the DoD, that request must still be handled promptly, even under high utilization. "We knew that we needed a very solid, extensible, standards-based foundation for NCES," says Dennis Nadler, CTO for Merlin International, a systems integrator working on the NCES project.

"We needed a dependable infrastructure with well developed APIs so that we could avoid the wild-west scenario, where every entity has its own implementation and none of them work together. In order for NCES to come to fruition, we would need tools to manage and register all of the web services throughout the enterprise and to prioritize and balance them to ensure quality of service. We found that AmberPoint and Systinet were the right governance solutions for the task."

AmberPoint and Systinet – Leading SOA Governance Solutions
Although they provide a number of benefits, SOA systems pose a few serious management challenges because they are loosely coupled applications comprised of disparate parts. Thus, if left unchecked, a single service failure could bring down many different applications. "DISA could not hope to have control over every Web service that NCES would facilitate," Nadler explains. "This is where AmberPoint’s non-invasive management capabilities made a world of difference. Because it abstracts the management layer, AmberPoint can act as an intermediary that monitors and controls the complete system, even external services that are consumed by NCES applications."

Where it has access to the content of messages sent by a particular Web service, DISA now can define and control service levels, exception handling, and security. AmberPoint executes management actions based on the content and context of the messages flowing through the SOA system. In cases where it lacks access to a given web service, DISA indirectly manages the service using AmberPoint’s non-invasive management functionality.

The two solutions work in tandem to provide control, manageability, and ease-of use to the NCES framework. For example, AmberPoint automatically detects new services posted to the Systinet registry, which serves as the central repository for all web service information, and begins monitoring it. Additionally, AmberPoint can detect any "rogue" services in the system and flag them to the Systinet registry. It can also automatically take action to mitigate issues and send alerts to IT staff. Based upon real-time performance data, users are enabled to make informed decisions on which services to use since the solution posts quality of service data to the Systinet registry.

"There may be thousands of services available to users but they want the best, most appropriate ones," Nadler states. "AmberPoint populates the Systinet Registry with information that provides visibility into which particular web service best suits their needs."

Policy Management – The Holy Grail of SOA
NCES also uses the AmberPoint and Systinet solutions to define and enforce policies that handle the full spectrum of governance requirements. "To me, policy management is the holy grail of SOA," Nadler explains. "It’s one of the biggest strengths of the AmberPoint/Systinet combination. Optimally, SOA architecture carries policies from the registry, automatically enforces those policies in the runtime environment, and closes the loop by bringing any policy changes back to the registry. AmberPoint and Systinet are delivering this holy grail."

Going Forward
Merlin has done a great deal of work to make NCES a reality. They sourced the key technologies and they have integrated them with the DoD systems. They have created the standard and crafted the best practices for implementing that standard, and are now working to move the NCES model to other governmental agencies. "The DISA charter for NCES was to build the foundation that would allow all of this extensible integration," Nadler states. "We are now using those foundation pieces and those design patterns and we are taking them to other locations. The public sector has a real need for this technology because many inter-dependent bodies like DISA and the Department of Homeland Security are still essentially islands. Over the next few years all of that is going to change."