[skormos]

"...there is no reason for the components of the app to depend on those things being global..."

BINGO! This is the anti-pattern part. Not that the data is globally required, but that your units are mutually dependable. This is why Interfaces and Dependency Injection are so popular now, because they facilitate the ability to make easily testable, singular units that allow for mocks / stubs etc.

To illustrate, what happens if your global requirement happens to also be external? Would you want to have to test your component with a live version of your global and external resource? No, you would want the ability to test (either as a single unit, or even the whole app), without requiring the database, messaging, web service, etc, to be up.