All-Dimensional Compliance™
Your SOA must comply with a diverse, dynamic, complex set of regulatory, business, and technical requirements. All-Dimensional Compliance™ is the ability to ensure that your SOA meets the composite set of baseline requirements specific to your organization. These baselines often derive from many sources, including regulatory, competitive, and operational requirements.

Within SOAComply™, the first step to achieving All-Dimensional Compliance™ is to model your organization’s compliance requirements as a set of "Operating States." Operating States are the baselines with which your SOA must comply. The objects in SOAComply™ are associated with Operating States.

An Operating State refers to any:

• Mission-critical business requirement


• Set of resource conditions to which SOA, or segments thereof, is expected to comply at some point in time


• Compliance baselines defined in laws, regulations, contracts, agreements, expectations, policies, rules, and performance thresholds

Operating States may include:

• Regulatory mandates, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley


• Service-level agreement dimensions, such as availability, reliability, performance, and security


• Certification programs, such as ISO9000


• Deployment life-cycle phases, such as pre-installation, installation, operations, and decommissioning


• Critical transient business conditions, such as peak-period, high-volume, surge, disaster recovery, and end-of-quarter demands on the SOA


• Legal agreements, such as customer contracts, trading partner agreements, and software licenses

An Operating State can be all of these dimensions combined into a composite baseline. SOAComply™ lets you model any baseline set of conditions that suits your business. Operating States are defined by the user, not by legislators or regulators.

SOAComply™ checks to see whether observed SOA conditions comply with Operating States. SOAComply™ is designed to be the central linking point for any third-party network, service, system, or operations monitoring product. A key capability in SOAComply™ is the ability to extract status information from any agent, probe, sensor, telemetric device, monitoring tool, or other resource that is capable of producing structured status reports. If the SOA, as observed through this network of agents and sensors, deviates from Operating States, SOAComply™ flags the discrepancies and notifies the impacted and/or responsible parties so that they can seek remediation.

SOAComply™ can determine the compliance of any segment of the SOA with the applicable Operating States. Operating State rules can apply to specific applications, resources, and/or networks—and to various collections and configurations of those entities. If it wished, an organization might define Operating State baselines to a very granular level—such as each user’s laptop and to the various corporate applications running on those devices.

It’s entirely up to SOAComply™ users to decide the scope, breadth, depth, structure, and content of the Operating State rules against which they measure All-Dimensional Compliance™.