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The widely accepted standards of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) have changed the way many organisations conduct their everyday business. The significant popularity of mobile devices has seen a rapid increase in the rate of mobile technology enhancements, which have become widely used for communication, as well as conducting everyday tasks. An increased requirement in many businesses is for staff not to be tied down to the office. Consequently, mobile devices play an important role in achieving the mobility and information access that people desire. Due to the popularity and increasing use of SOA and mobile devices, Mobile Service-Oriented Architecture (Mobile SOA) has become a new industry catch-phrase. Many challenges, however, exist within the Mobile SOA environment. These issues include limitations on mobile devices, such as a reduced screen size, lack of processing power, insufficient processing memory, limited battery life, poor storage capacity, unreliable network connections, limited bandwidth available and high transfer costs. This research aimed to provide an elegant solution to the issues of a mobile device, which hinders the performance of Mobile SOA. The main objective of this research was to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of Mobile SOA. In order to achieve this goal, a framework was proposed, which supported intelligent compression of files used within a Web Service. The proposed framework provided a set of guidelines that facilitate the quick development of a system. A proof-of-concept prototype was developed, based on these guidelines and the framework design principles. The prototype provided practical evidence of the effectiveness of implementing a system based on the proposed framework. An analytical evaluation was conducted to determine the effectiveness of the prototype within the Mobile SOA environment. A performance evaluation was conducted to determine efficiency it provides. Additionally, the performance evaluation highlighted the decrease in file transfer time, as well as the significant reduction in transfer costs. The analytical and performance evaluations demonstrated that the prototype optimises the effectiveness and efficiency of Mobile SOA. The framework could, thus, be used to facilitate efficient file transfer between a Server and (Mobile) Client.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science and Agriculture in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters of Science in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2014 / In today‘s service-oriented business environments, the standard Publish-Find-Bind model as embodied by the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm presents a new strong challenge in the consumption and applicability of services to its consumers. This is because services in SOA-based environments are not built and published for predefined consumers; rather they are advertised for potentially many unknown consumers. Thus, they could be (re) used by various anonymous consumers with varying requirements and business needs. Hence, to increase service applicability and efficiency in the consumption of services, as well as to stay relevant in today‘s global market economy, service providers are expected to provide services covering such a wide variety of demands. However, they are still faced and have to deal with a number of problems which need to be balanced. Consequently, this research work addresses the problem of how to deliver customizable software services, as a way to address and/or increase the applicability and efficiency in the consumption of software services. In particular, this research proposed a service customization framework called FreeCust, which exploits the feature modeling concepts or techniques from the Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) discipline. The FreeCust framework as suggested in this research was constructed, validated, and evaluated through practical use case scenarios, proof-of-concept prototype implementations, experiments, and a comparative (static) analysis. This was to show its utility, technical feasibility, functional correctness, and business benefits. The evaluation and validation results demonstrated that the FreeCust approach has the potential or is appropriate for minimizing the complexities involved in consumers‘ service customization processes and increasing service applicability. / Telkom SA SOC Limited

<p>One of the main trends in the IT field today is to provide more mobility to existing IT based systems and users. With this trend, more and more people are using mobile financial transactions due to a widespread proliferation of mobile phones and wireless technologies. One of the most important concerns with such transactions is their security. The reasons are based on weaknesses of wireless protocols and additional requirements for handling of financial data. These aspects make mobile financial transactions and applications even more vulnerable to fraud and illegal use than similar transactions performed over fixed networks.</p><p> </p><p>There are two important aspects related to security in mobile environments. First, security features provided by the communication protocols, such as GSM, SMS, Bluetooth, Mobile Internet, etc. are not adequate. Some security algorithms used by these protocols have even been broken, what requires upper layer applications to provide comprehensive protection in order to compensate the shortcomings of a transportation layer. Second, mobile devices have limited capabilities, limited processing speed, limited storage, etc, so that many security mechanisms are not suitable for mobile environments. Therefore, new, effective, lightweight and flexible security solutions are required.</p><p> </p><p>In order to solve these two groups of security issues, in this research we created a service-oriented security infrastructure for mobile financial transactions and applications. Based on this infrastructure, we also designed and implemented a system, which is called <em>SAFE</em> (Secure Applications for Financial Environment), that represents a secure, convenient and reliable large–scale infrastructure for mobile financial transactions. The components of the system are Secure Mobile Wallet and three <em>SAFE</em> servers: Communications (Gateway) Server, IDMS (Identity Management System) Server, and Payment Server. Those core infrastructure components with secure messages exchanged between them provide a number of secure financial services. These services may be used for various types of mobile transactions: m–Banking, m–Commerce, m–Ticketing, m-Parking, m–Loans, etc. all supported by additional Application Services Provider servers, connected to the <em>SAFE</em> security system. This report gives the details of the concept design and current implementation of the <em>SAFE</em> system.</p> / QC20100608 / Secure Applications for Financial Environments (SAFE) Project

For IT project managers, how to implement IT projects successfully is always an important issue due to high failure rate of traditional IT project implementation. When more and more enterprises start to develop systems under the new IT methodology in service oriented IT projects, it is essential to access risks coming with this new IT concept. In this research we aim to identify risk factors related to service oriented IT projects and then analyze the impact and rank of these risk factors. Adapted from the general IT project risk category proposed by Ewusi (1994), we propose 6 risk factors of service-oriented IT projects. The risk framework highlights the properties of business strategy, business Process, and workforce under on-demand business architecture. We use a customer service system to justify our research framework, applying the IBM’s concept of SIMM (service integrated maturity model). A pretest is first conducted with several IT experts who has implemented service oriented IT project experience, followed by a general survey. A binary logistic regression is used to testify the hypotheses. The result shows that essential risk factors that influence the adoption of service oriented system, from the highest to lowest, are insufficient technology planning, lack of expertise, ineffective project governance, and organizational misalignment. The findings help CIOs and project managers realize of the risks and the priority of these risks that have to be noticed and controlled when making decisions on service oriented systems adoption.

Mobile transactions have been in development for around ten years. More and more initiatives and efforts are invested in this area resulting in dramatic and rapid development and deployment of mobile technologies and applications. However, there are still many issues that hinder wider deployment and acceptance of mobile systems, especially those handling serious and sensitive mobile transactions. One of the most important of them is security.This dissertation is focused on security architecture for mobile environments. Research issues addressed in this dissertation are based on three currently important groups of problems: a) lack of an open, comprehensive, adaptable and secure infrastructure for mobile services and applications; b) lack of standardized solutions for secure mobile transactions, compliant with various regulatory and user requirements and applicable to different types of popular mobile devices and hardware/software mobile platforms; and c) resource limitations of mobile devices and mobile networks.The main contribution of this dissertation is large-scale, secure service-oriented architecture for mobile environments. The architecture structures secure mobile transaction systems into seven layers, called trusted stack, which is equivalent to ISO/OSI layered networking model. These layers are, starting from the bottom: 1) secure element (chip) layer, 2) applets layer, 3) middleware layer, 4) mobile applications layer, 5) communication layer, 6) services broker layer, and 7) mobile service provider layer. These seven layers include all necessary components required for implementation and operations of secure mobile transaction systems and therefore provide a framework for designing and implementing such systems.Besides the architecture, four types of security services necessary and critical for serious mobile transactions, have also been designed and described in the dissertation. These services are: (1) mobile registration and identity management; (2) mobile PKI; (3) mobile authentication and authorization; and (4) secure messaging. These services are lightweight, therefore suitable for mobile environments, technologies and applications, and also compliant with existing Internet security standards.Finally, as the proof of correctness of the proposed concept and methodology, a prototype system was also developed based on the designed security architecture. The system provides comprehensive security services mentioned above to several types of mobile services providers: mobile banking, mobile commerce, mobile ticketing, and mobile parking. These types of providers have been selected only as currently the most popular and representative, since the architecture is applicable to any other type of mobile service providers.

Today, there are no standardized ways to characterize SOA, many are talking about SOA and many say they are using SOA. One way that we have chosen to characterize this phenomenon is through an evaluation that will indicate whether SOA have been used in the development. Basedon a Service Oriented Architecture literature study, we have created an evaluation pattern resulting SOA principles of integration, architecture and services. This evaluation was applied to Logica's own integration system AgrCom through an empirical study to result in a response indicating whether AgrCom is SOA based. The results of the evaluation show that AgrCom is part of an SOA solution but not an SOA as a whole concept. The study shows that it takes morethan just systems in an activity to be referred to as the SOA-based, hence the architecture of anactivity must be taken into account.

Corporations are actively pursuing business model innovation and organizational agility in the quest for sustainable competitive advantage in today??s global marketplace. The paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as a popular approach to flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. The associated concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables the defining of business flows as technology independent services, potentially providing avenues for agility in business process transformation. This architectural concept is growing in popularity and is being rapidly adopted by industry organizations. Studies of the practical impacts of adopting SOA are crucial because it involves a non-trivial and expensive overhaul of both business and technology infrastructures. There is, however, a paucity of critical research on the adoption of SOA. What is needed is a focus on the study of the real-world adoption of SOA across the enterprise and the factors that aid or impede such adoptions. This research examines the organizational use of SOA, both analytically and empirically through case studies, and posits a diffusion framework for the adoption and implementation of SOA as an enterprise strategy. The SOA Diffusion Framework addresses the following key areas ?? the organizational factors influencing the decision to adopt SOA, the organizational aspects of adopting and implementing SOA, and the outcomes or realized benefits of implementing SOA across the enterprise. For researchers, this study (i) fills a crucial knowledge gap because there is little empirical evidence of the practical use of SOA, (ii) adds to the innovation diffusion literature, (iii) introduces a tool to assess the organizational impact of SOA, and (iv) provides direction for future research into the organizational factors relating to the enterprise adoption of service-orientation. For practitioners, this study provides an adoption framework and a set of guidelines to help implement SOA successfully across the enterprise.

Corporations are actively pursuing business model innovation and organizational agility in the quest for sustainable competitive advantage in today??s global marketplace. The paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as a popular approach to flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. The associated concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables the defining of business flows as technology independent services, potentially providing avenues for agility in business process transformation. This architectural concept is growing in popularity and is being rapidly adopted by industry organizations. Studies of the practical impacts of adopting SOA are crucial because it involves a non-trivial and expensive overhaul of both business and technology infrastructures. There is, however, a paucity of critical research on the adoption of SOA. What is needed is a focus on the study of the real-world adoption of SOA across the enterprise and the factors that aid or impede such adoptions. This research examines the organizational use of SOA, both analytically and empirically through case studies, and posits a diffusion framework for the adoption and implementation of SOA as an enterprise strategy. The SOA Diffusion Framework addresses the following key areas ?? the organizational factors influencing the decision to adopt SOA, the organizational aspects of adopting and implementing SOA, and the outcomes or realized benefits of implementing SOA across the enterprise. For researchers, this study (i) fills a crucial knowledge gap because there is little empirical evidence of the practical use of SOA, (ii) adds to the innovation diffusion literature, (iii) introduces a tool to assess the organizational impact of SOA, and (iv) provides direction for future research into the organizational factors relating to the enterprise adoption of service-orientation. For practitioners, this study provides an adoption framework and a set of guidelines to help implement SOA successfully across the enterprise.

One of the main trends in the IT field today is to provide more mobility to existing IT based systems and users. With this trend, more and more people are using mobile financial transactions due to a widespread proliferation of mobile phones and wireless technologies. One of the most important concerns with such transactions is their security. The reasons are based on weaknesses of wireless protocols and additional requirements for handling of financial data. These aspects make mobile financial transactions and applications even more vulnerable to fraud and illegal use than similar transactions performed over fixed networks.   There are two important aspects related to security in mobile environments. First, security features provided by the communication protocols, such as GSM, SMS, Bluetooth, Mobile Internet, etc. are not adequate. Some security algorithms used by these protocols have even been broken, what requires upper layer applications to provide comprehensive protection in order to compensate the shortcomings of a transportation layer. Second, mobile devices have limited capabilities, limited processing speed, limited storage, etc, so that many security mechanisms are not suitable for mobile environments. Therefore, new, effective, lightweight and flexible security solutions are required.   In order to solve these two groups of security issues, in this research we created a service-oriented security infrastructure for mobile financial transactions and applications. Based on this infrastructure, we also designed and implemented a system, which is called SAFE (Secure Applications for Financial Environment), that represents a secure, convenient and reliable large–scale infrastructure for mobile financial transactions. The components of the system are Secure Mobile Wallet and three SAFE servers: Communications (Gateway) Server, IDMS (Identity Management System) Server, and Payment Server. Those core infrastructure components with secure messages exchanged between them provide a number of secure financial services. These services may be used for various types of mobile transactions: m–Banking, m–Commerce, m–Ticketing, m-Parking, m–Loans, etc. all supported by additional Application Services Provider servers, connected to the SAFE security system. This report gives the details of the concept design and current implementation of the SAFE system. / QC20100608 / Secure Applications for Financial Environments (SAFE) Project