The promise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a world where everything interoperates seamlessly, pieces of applications are reused endlessly and development of new systems is quick, cheap and easy. But despite some high-profile deployments and the spread of Web services, when it comes to financial firms doing serious business with each other, SOA is being [...]

It’s the new reality of IT: working as part of a global team, with coworker and outsourcers all over the world, coordinated by a project manager at headquarters. But that reality can be ugly, as managers are stretched across time zones, with no such thing as being off the clock.

New channels of electronic communication have been a boon to many industries, opening up sales and marketing opportunities, helping improve customer service and speeding up innovation and collaboration. For Wall Street, however, the benefits of technology such as Twitter have to be weighed against the compliance pains.

OppenheimerFunds used to have a data entry problem. Address changes that customers made on its website had to be manually re-entered into a variety of back-end systems before they went into effect.

New channels of electronic communication have been a boon to many industries, opening up sales and marketing opportunities, helping improve customer service and speeding up innovation and collaboration. For Wall Street, however, the benefits of technology such as Twitter have to be weighed against the compliance pains.

One of the chief attractions of cloud computing is that firms don’t have to worry about where or how their processing work gets done, but that is also its biggest risk.

Virtualization, in one form or another, has been around almost as long as computers. When the term arose in the 1960s, it referred to the partitioning of mainframe computers. But virtualization soon became a way to let people stop worrying about the inner workings of their hardware.

Salesforce.com reached a milestone last fall: 1 million people using the online software company to host their customer relationship management systems and other key business processes.

Dividing a server into multiple virtual machines has brought down firms’ purchasing costs and allowed for more efficient use of existing hardware. However, virtualization also poses security risks and challenges, including managing a more complex network, additional layers of technology, potential data leaks as multiple virtual machines share common communication lines, and the threat of rogue machines.

At the heart of Societe Generale’s recent EUR4.82 billion ($7.01 billion) in losses from unauthorized trades is the fact that the accused trader–Jerome Kerviel–was able to use his knowledge of the system to get around the checks and balances.