Organizations need to launch new products, services or digital solutions rapidly, that keep up to speed with consumers and users´ changing demands. As well, they need to offer a collaborative, flexible environment to their own staff, so they can work remotely without forsaking productivity.
The accelerated pace of these transformations resulted in many companies deciding to upload more workloads every time, as well as applications and data to the Cloud, many times hiring Cloud services from one or more suppliers. This, as well, resulted in having to deal with a great increase in the number of applications and data sources to wire, distributed along the company´s premises or in the Cloud.
Now: the integration of Cloud environments is one of the main challenges companies face today, given that, as we were saying, they have a considerable increase in processes, applications, data sources, services and devices in the Cloud – in their ecosystem, which need integration. The trend is to go towards a hybrid TI architecture – this is, informatics models which include services as well as local resources in different Clouds – so, it all gets even more complicated.
Difficulties in integration
In a world which demands quick answers to adapt to increasingly demanding customers, organizations usually face a series of integration problems that compromise its capacity to enable new commercial processes and answer quickly. This limits their capacity to innovate and evolve. For example, they encounter difficulties when integrating legacy applications, issues with data quality and technology diversity. Besides, they usually lack qualified development resources for their integration needs.
On another note, companies have difficulties adapting to the trends of Cloud Computing and Cloud technology on the market. And precisely because they imply each time more amounts of processes, applications, data sources and devices in the Cloud, they have issues in keeping a complex hybrid TI architecture.
It is frequently difficult for them to incorporate or replace systems, and to integrate local applications, in the Cloud and of third parties. It is also common that they have to face challenges to administer and escalate hardware from middleware, among other factors, due to the lack of suppliers‘ support for obsolete technologies. In this same way, it is possible they find limitations to do business with commercial partners, among other details, due to their weak security and the confidentiality of information.
In such a context, organizations evidence a slow progress towards becoming a digital business, and it is hard for them to manage their digital company assets (API).
Integration services
To satisfy the need for safe and dependable Cloud integration solutions, many suppliers have started offering integration services, which are channelled under a model of integration platform as a service (iPaaS). iPaaS is a platform to build and implement integrations inside the Cloud and between the Cloud and the company.
With iPaaS users can develop integration flows which connect applications that reside in the Cloud or in the company premises, and then implement them without installing or managing any hardware or middleware.
That is to say, integration platforms provide organizations with the infrastructure to build and implement on the Cloud without having to manage hardware or middleware in itself. On the one hand, this cloud platform based integration reduces the load of internal storage solutions, without requiring that the organization sacrifices capacity. Besides, it eliminates the need for 24 hour 7 days a week security, and places it in the hands of companies with capacities to keep ahead proactively. Besides iPaaS also eliminates the hassle of maintenance of legacy products.
By a good measure, this company integration technology makes the dream of hybrid architectures become true, achieving that data integration and applications and subsequent update management become much more fluid at a company level.
Objective advantages
iPaaS is a modern solution for the integration challenges companies face nowadays. Choosing a middleware in the Cloud or iPaaS provides the capacity to connect and automatize the integration of data sources, applications and processes with no issues, along the hybrid TI (business process automation).
iPaaS tools count with pre designed connectors for the majority of specific third party commercial products and applications, as well as for different communication protocols. This turns it into the perfect adjustment for hybrid scenarios with diverse technologies and architectures, speeding up the delivery of commercial results.
iPaaS accelerates the connection time between software solutions and data sources. It facilitates support for complex mapping integration. It consolidates integrations that grant more security. It ensures a scalable integration growth for the strategic planning of the roadmap. It reduces the cost of system updates, introduction of new systems and evolution of commercial needs. In such a way, it establishes the basis for a scalable and innovative digital business.
Strategic ally
In brief, iPaaS allows an organization to integrate and automatize multiple data sources, applications and processes inside a hybrid TI panorama which offers a unified solution with an environment to manage.
At Baufest, we make a point of educating our customers about the most beneficial integration options available for their environment and their commercial objectives (through integration discovery workshops), in this case related to Cloud Middleware Ipaas. We guide them towards a solution which resolves their present weaknesses, scalable and quick to implement, at the same time adjusting to their expectations of output and budget.
Our policy is to not implement technological digital solutions unless we can define a result that is clear and beneficial for the company´s commercial needs.
Is your company having issues with Cloud Integration?