system without interruption of operations. SOAIF components Essential elements of an SOAIF include design-time and run-time infrastructure, together with service-oriented tools for deploying distributed processes and implementation flows. Enterprise service bus The core infrastructure of an SOAIF is typically provided by an enterprise service bus (ESB), which addresses the challenges in composing, deploying, and managing distributed, service-based enterprise applications. The ESB incorporates a standards-based, enterprise-class messaging backbone, together with enhanced systems connectivity using web services, Java EE, .NET Framework, and other standards. One approach that contributes to an optimal SOA implementation is the use of an Enterprise service bus (ESB) to provide an infrastructural element to distributed Services on the network. The ESB approach to integration considers systems as discrete, distributed Services that connect to each other via an asynchronous, message-oriented communications infrastructure. The message-oriented infrastructure allows loosely coupled, document-oriented exchanges between independent systems. ESBs provides the critical infrastructure components that simplify and scale integration approaches. ESBs do not however provide the required integration to meet high-level business requirements. ESBs also do not provide guarantees of loose coupling and coarse granularity to meet evolving Service-oriented needs. Implementing ESBs to meet SOA requirements require the addition of extra functionality to compose fine-grained atomic Services into coarse-grained business Services and provide policy-driven, managed, and secure Service interactions. An ESB links individual enterprises together for extended process efficiency across the supply chain, allowing them to become more flexible and adaptable to rapidly changing requirements. The ESB lets an enterprise leverage its previous investments by supporting the deployment of processes over existing software and hardware infrastructure. As the core, underlying infrastructure of an SOAIF, ESBs offer several unique business and technical advantages: support for enterprise standards, fault tolerance, scalability, and reliability, service-based tools, easy process deployment and changes, component-level security, run-time monitoring, tracing, and logging. Business process management Business process management (BPM) considers systems and IT assets as activities or tasks that participate in well-coordinated and centrally orchestrated Business processes. Traditionally, the challenge of BPM is that while it is possible to construct processes that achieve integration goals, enterprises typically use BPM tools only at design time, modeling processes as they used to be or processes as they should be, but rarely processes as they actually are in the IT environment. So, while BPM solutions can craft orchestrated processes that are composed of fine-grained Services, they don’t contain the runtime environment necessary for loosely