But cloud computing is causing discomfort among some IT professionals, who are concerned that cloud-based services may fall outside the scope of established service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance initiatives.

After several grueling years of implementing life-cycle controls over their Web services environments, these IT pros now worry they may have to radically revamp those efforts to keep pace with rogue adoption of outsourced cloud services.

SOA governance, also known as service governance, refers to practices and tools for enforcing consistent development, security, performance and other policies across the life cycle of key functions, regardless of whether they are hosted internally or provided by outsourcers.

Effective SOA governance is extremely important. It enables organizations to continuously plan, design, validate, publish, provision, monitor, modify, secure and optimize their distributed environments. And it ensures that services deployed in enterprise application environments -- be they built on clouds, mainframes or any other platform -- comply with regulatory, policy, operational and other baseline requirements.

Strong SOA governance is key to cloud control