The EA discipline is not about driving the next technological advance and hanging up its gloves. EA is about enabling an organization to reach it strategic goals – goals that move and change as market forces demand.

There is no doubt that the use of cloud based services will impact the application, data and technology architecture layers but EA teams need to apply the same governance principles to an application hosted in the cloud as they do for a locally hosted application. It is important that cloud based applications comply with application architecture requirements for security, high availability, performance, etc. so that the organization does not introduce additional risk into its architectural landscape.

There are obvious benefits to using cloud based services: no need to maintain software and hardware, most services provide redundancy and disaster recovery guarantees, etc. but architects must consider how they will integrate these services into the organizations business processes, what the impact on business will be if these services are not available, the degree of flexibility offered and the nature of any data involved. Obviously nothing is simple so EA needs to play an important part in determining if using cloud services it the best way forward for the organization.

The focus shouldn’t be about which technology you use but rather it’s about defining the relationships and requirements between all architectural layers, from business architecture to technology architecture to ensure the business requirements are fully supported and can withstand the dynamic nature of business today.