DYNAMIC PAGE -- HIGHEST POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION IS
TOP SECRET // SI / TK // REL TO USA AUS CAN GBR NZL
(U) A SIGINT SOA?
FROM: Michael McNamee
Chief, SIGINT Systems Engineering (S01A)
Run Date: 09/20/2006
(U//FOUO) Attention, Systems Engineers and Analysts, Program Managers, Developers, and
website, application and database owners: SID is moving toward a Service-Oriented
Architecture. What does that entail?
(U//FOUO) Many of you have probably heard the IT industry's enthusiastic support for ServiceOriented Architectures (SOA) as the way forward for large enterprises, or that DOD CJCS
doctrine endorses implementation of an SOA to enable network-centric operations, or that the
ODNI CIO (responsible for Intelligence Community Enterprise Architecture) specifies an IC-wide
SOA to enable an intelligence Information Sharing Environment. Furthermore, the commercial
sector's broad scale use of SOA-related technologies will drive many of the products and
applications we use in our daily SIGINT mission in this direction.
(U//FOUO) So, what does this all mean for SIGINT? At the minimum, this means that NSA will
need to implement SOA technologies and practices in order to meet IC and DOD
mandates for intelligence information sharing. This movement to an SOA is a good thing,
as for many years NSA has been moving to a construct of a service-based architecture
consisting of modular mission application services that can be integrated in a flexible, loosely
coupled manner.
(U) Advantages of SOA
(U//FOUO) Service-Oriented Architectures use a strategy that organizes the discrete capabilities
contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards-based services that can be
rapidly combined and re-used to meet dynamically changing mission needs. This provides a
cost-effective means to leverage existing investments (legacy applications) and integrate new
capabilities to provide improved mission capabilities even to authenticated-but-unanticipated
users. Moving from the present tightly coupled vertical SIGINT systems to a loosely coupled set
of re-usable services that are horizontally integrated provides greater flexibility, extensibility
and agility against continuous target communication changes. This also enables cross-domain
information sharing and better use of resources. An agile SIGINT system architecture is a critical
enabler to cope with the dynamically changing SIGINT target communications environment.
(U) SOA vs. Web Services
(U) The SOA term is often synonymously used with the term Web Services; however, it goes
beyond Web Services. Web Services protocols and standards ( SOAP , UDDI , WSDL , SAML ,
etc.) provide the foundation for an SOA but an SOA includes:
Use of semantic metadata to enable machine and human discovery of data and services;
Use of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to enable cross-domain integration; and
Use of Orchestration to enable flexible business process management workflows between
loosely coupled services
(Please see our SOA Tutorial for more information.)
(U//FOUO) A key to an SOA is that services have exposed interfaces with formally controlled
Service Level Agreements (SLA) that fully define the service functionality, performance
parameters, and invocation mechanisms. Such services must be registered so that they can be
readily discovered and invoked by any authorized consumer, and especially by unanticipated
users or systems. This allows rapid activation and linkage of services to support new or evolving
missions. An SOA makes application functionality available through shared services discoverable
on a network through a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry. This
will provide a basis for code re-use and application sharing, thereby decoupling applications from
the infrastructure.
(U) Next Steps for NSA
(U//FOUO) IC and DOD near-term requirements mandate that NSA establish an on-line (JWICS)
UDDI registry where NSA publishes its on-line XML and web services-enabled data files,
databases and mission applications so that they are discoverable by IC and DOD users. In FY07,
SIGINT System Engineering (SSE) will be leading a cross-functional ITD and SID lineorganization IPT (Integrated Product Team) in developing and implementing a web servicesenabled UDDI registry and SOA practices. The goal is for SID to get an early prototype SOA
learning experience in FY07 so that NSA can begin enabling SIGINT operational SOA services
both internally and for external customers (on JWICS) in FY08.
(U//FOUO) The POC for this article Mike McNamee, Chief, SSE (
.
"(U//FOUO) SIDtoday articles may not be republished or reposted outside NSANet
without the consent of S0121 (DL sid_comms)."
DYNAMIC PAGE -- HIGHEST POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION IS
TOP SECRET // SI / TK // REL TO USA AUS CAN GBR NZL
DERIVED FROM: NSA/CSSM 1-52, DATED 08 JAN 2007 DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108