Organizations need to rapidly launch new digital products, services or solutions that keep up with the changing demands of consumers and users. They also need to offer a flexible collaborative environment to their own staff, so they can work remotely without sacrificing productivity.
The accelerated pace of these transformations made many companies decide to upload more and more workloads, applications and data to the Cloud, in many cases contracting Cloud services from one or more providers. But this itself means that there is a large increase in applications and data sources to wire, distributed throughout the company premises or in the Cloud.
Now: integration in Cloud environments is one of the main challenges that dynamic companies like yours face today, given that you surely have a growing number of processes, applications, data sources, services, and devices in the Cloud in their ecosystem that they need integration. As the trend is also to move towards a hybrid IT architecture, that is, computing models that include both local resources and services in different Clouds, things become even more complex.
Integration challenges
In a world that demands quick responses to adapt to increasingly demanding customers, organizations typically have a number of integration issues that compromise their ability to enable new business processes and respond quickly. This is a paradox that must be resolved: on the one hand, the migration to the Cloud clearly accelerated some processes, but it introduced some complexities that must be resolved, since this limits the ability to innovate and evolve. For example, many companies have difficulties to integrate legacy applications, data quality problems and diversity of technologies. In addition, they often lack qualified development resources for integration needs.
On the other hand, companies have problems adapting to the market’s own Cloud Computing and Cloud technology trends. And precisely because they are bringing more and more processes, applications, data sources, services and devices to the cloud, they have trouble maintaining a complex, hybrid IT architecture.
It is quite frequent that they find it difficult to incorporate or replace systems, integrate local applications, in the Cloud and third parties. It is also common for them to have challenges managing and scaling middleware hardware, among other factors, due to a lack of vendor support for outdated technologies. In the same way, they may find limitations to do business with business partners, among other details, due to the weak security and confidentiality of communications.
In such a context, organizations are making slow progress towards becoming a digital business and finding it difficult to manage their enterprise digital assets (APIs).
Integration services
To meet this need for secure and reliable cloud integration solutions, several providers began to offer integration services, which are channeled under the Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) model. iPaaS is a platform for building and implementing integrations within the Cloud and between the Cloud and the enterprise.
With iPaaS, users can develop integration flows that connect applications that reside in the Cloud or on the company’s own premises, and then deploy them without installing or managing any hardware or middleware.
In other words, integration platforms provide your organization with the infrastructure to build and implement in the Cloud without having to manage the hardware or the middleware itself. Also, this cloud-based integration reduces the burden on internal storage solutions, without requiring the organization to sacrifice capacity. It also removes the burden of maintaining security 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and puts it in the hands of companies with the capabilities to proactively stay up-to-date. In addition, iPaaS also eliminates the cumbersome maintenance of legacy products.
This saying that to a large extent this enterprise integration technology makes the dream of hybrid architectures a reality, by making data and application integration and subsequent management of updates much more seamless at the enterprise level.
Objective advantages
iPaaS is a modern solution to the integration challenges that organizations face today. Adopting an iPaaS or Cloud middleware provides the ability to seamlessly connect and automate the integration of data sources, applications, and processes across hybrid IT (business process automation).
IPaaS tools have pre-engineered connectors for most specific third-party commercial products and applications, as well as different communication protocols. This makes it a perfect fit for hybrid scenarios with diverse technologies and architectures, speeding up the delivery of business results.
iPaaS speeds time to connect software solutions and data sources. It facilitates support for complex integration mapping. Consolidate integrations that provide greater security. Provides scalable integration growth for strategic roadmap planning. And it reduces the cost of system upgrades, the introduction of new systems, and evolving business needs. Thus, it lays the foundation for a scalable and innovative digital business.
Your strategic partner
iPaaS enables an organization to integrate and automate multiple data sources, applications, and processes within a hybrid IT landscape that offers a unified solution with one environment to manage.
At Baufest we take care of educating our clients about the most beneficial integration options available for their environment and their business objectives (through integration discovery workshops), in this case related to Cloud Midleware Ipaas. We guide you to a solution that solves your current pain points, is quick to implement, and scalable, while meeting your budget and performance expectations.
Our policy is not to implement digital technology solutions unless we can define a clear and beneficial outcome for the business needs of companies.
Is your company having problems of integration in the Cloud? We invite you to comment on the case here!