Finance Sector: Requirements for High Assurance within Spatial SOA Based Grid Infrastructures

Businesses are increasingly reliant upon their IT infrastructure. A company's IT infrastructure often supports both a means of interacting with customers and of supporting basic day-to-day business operations. Recently, SOA based Grid infrastructure has emerged as a viable commercial alternatives to expensive dedicated high assurance IT systems, especially within the Finance sector. This paper presents from a commercial perspective a critical assessment of the limitations of today's SOA based approaches to high assurance. A use case from the Finance Sector is presented, which has deep implications in terms of high availability, security and spatial awareness in a SOA environment. Finally the requirements for a high assurance framework to manage the lifecycle of applications and services deployed within such SOA based Grid infrastructures is presented.