12 cloud predictions of Christmas: Evolution of enterprise architecture

Enterprise architecture is constantly evolving and cloud computing will play a big part in that evolution.  There are several trends in EA that will emerge this year, I’m focusing on three of them.

• Greater involvement from the business
  As IT investments become business driven, business executives controlling corporate strategy will need to become more involved in EA and eventually drive the process.

Business executive involvement will be especially helpful when outsourcing IT processes, such as cloud computing. Expect to see greater interest from executives and business schools that will implement coursework and training to reflect this shift, as well as increased discussion on the value of business architecture.

• Debate on the architectural principles for use of cloud computing 
  Service orientation has become established as a principle of EA. Enterprises are increasingly using cloud computing for important projects. Cloud started by translating monolithic applications to SaaS but provision of web resources with REST-ful interfaces is rapidly gaining ground. Questions that will be hotly debated (and perhaps answered) are whether REST will become the accepted approach to service orientation on the cloud, and whether the cloud community can realise the SOA aspirations of dynamic discovery and composition.

• Resurgence of interest in semantic technology
  The semantic web has been a possibility for so long that many people already regard it as history. With the emergence of web resources accessed by HTTP as a key cloud concept, the semantic web Resource Description Framework could assume a new importance.