Enforcing the Law with SOA

I have come across a few customers recently who are constrained in their business model by national regulations.  Certain jurisdictions require customer data of their nationals to be stored on servers physically located within their jurisdiction.  In addition to restrictions on customer data they have observed that although they allow customers access to their entire product range there is a strong regional alignment with products, basically most people purchase the local product.

This is driving these customers down the service oriented architecture route by fiat rather than by desire.  SOA enables them to run multiple "customer" and "market" server instances with the same services available from all different geographic systems.  "Markets" can be kept at a regional level whilst "Customer" data may need to be held at a national level.  SOA is a good fit for this as it already assumes a service view of functionality and is easy to extend the location concept to these services.

Interconnections between service instances can be realised with an ESB and routing rules can deliver requests to the correct instance, hiding the system complexity in the ESB, making the system responsive to future changes in customer data location or market information.  I think SOA makes this a lot easier than trying to do it with a distributed database, but that is just my opinion.