Reinterpreting the principles of SOA through the cybernetic concepts of VSM to design the ESB as iPaaS in the cloud

One of the fundamental challenges in the design, governance, implementation, and maintenance of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) systems is the variety of enabling technologies, such as those realised in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and the absence of a vendor-agnostic approach towards the development of standardised policies, procedures or guidelines to justify the resulting system. This issue is especially actualised in the era of Cloud that integrates together a wide variety of heterogeneous systems. To address this issue, this paper proposes a set of novel design principles, based on the cybernetic concepts of the Viable System Model (VSM), to contribute to the design of the ESB as a Cloud service model, such as the Infrastructure Platform as a Service (iPaaS). These new principles can help those who need to use the Cloud and those who provide Cloud-based services. Essentially, these principles are not limited to the Cloud settings only and can be applied to services at various levels of enterprise. The proposed principles are identified to be useful and toned to undergo testing to further justify their usability in a number of organisations in Australia and in Europe.