Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural model that provides a methodology and a working framework to connect multiple applications based on services. Companies which are dealing with inflexible point-to-point connected applications requiring extensive re-coding, testing and deploying should move to SOA to allow better speed, agility and flexibility.
SOA allows creating new applications increasing the value of current systems and automating new processes. Standardizing the approach to business problems using SOA significantly improves architecture goals such as layered architecture, separation of concerns as well as improving security, performance and availability.