Market Forces
Market Forces
In 2017, IDC conducted a survey finding that 75% of respondents work with more than one cloud vendor, and 40% work with at least four cloud vendors1. We all live in a multicloud world with evolving digital businesses deploying applications across public clouds and private clouds as well as on-premises systems. As the number of these applications increases and the adoption of new cloud environments also grows, integration solutions must increasingly contend with applications that have different architectures, integrations styles for applications on cloud to legacy applications on premise and variances in data formats and protocols. Given the complexity of a multicloud environment, businesses face a growing integration challenge.
Challenges
Challenges
Business leaders are taking charge in making technology adoption decisions altering the role of central IT. While businesses see faster time to value, lowered costs and the cultivation of an innovative and experimental culture, the rapid adoption of new applications can create repercussions that central IT will be tasked to solve. It has become increasingly important for central IT teams to ensure that architectural integrity is preserved at the same rate that business is growing and resolve the increasing complexity of governance and integration.
Governance Complexity
As business leaders adopt new applications to respond to market challenges quickly, the central IT team provides access to core systems so that the application integration teams can create integration flows and expose APIs to automate tasks. However, the central IT team needs to manage existing systems, ensure security of data in the core systems and address governance issues that result from a decentralized deployment.
Integration Complexity
The continued trend of organizations to adopt and build new applications across clouds can result in a data disparity problem. With different data sets sitting in a multitude of locations, it is imperative to connect data to build a full view of the business. However, integrating this data must account for issues of mismatched architectures, data formats, and standards brought on by the distribution of data across so many applications and systems. Ensuring proper integration will frequently require custom code integration solutions that only the central IT team has the expertise to build. This reliance on the central IT team to solve for the complexity of customized integration flows can create further obstacles of resource and time constraints.
Use Case: Marketing Campaign for Mortgages
Every spring, when the real-estate market is most active, banks run marketing campaigns to drive mortgage business. With the right integration solution, marketers can build targeted marketing campaigns quickly by integrating insight from transactional data, customer data, personalized related offerings from real estate companies, etc. By automating the integration of these different applications built with different data formats and standards in a simple configuration approach. As new applications get added to provide a better customer experience within the campaign, the central IT team can maintain security and governance of data and work together with application teams to improve productivity.
How does your organization measure up?
Our business is equipped to handle integration of multiple applications.
Agree
By rapidly integrating applications, businesses can respond faster to market challenges, lower costs and improve scalibility.
Learn more about App Connect Continue to learn more about the role of multicloudDisagree
As the number of applications adopted in an organization increase, it has become increasingly important for central IT teams to ensure that architectural integrity is preserved at the same rate that business is growing thus complicating integration in a multicloud environment.
Learn more about multicloud integration Continue to learn more about the role of multicloudRole of Multicloud Integration
Role of Multicloud Integration
There are plenty of complexities that integration can solve, but what are the benefits? Integration provides value both on an organizational level as well as an operational level.
Organizational benefits
Integrating your applications across various clouds is one important step toward synchronizing your data. However, enterprises need an integration tool that allows deployment of integration runtimes within multiple clouds. By deploying close to the application, you see lower latency times as processes run directly within the cloud, and lower costs from not needing to move data in and out of platforms.
Operational benefits
When you choose an integration tool that users can deploy across multiple clouds, you can see benefits within the integration process such as the ability to access any data on any system, ensuring proper integration despite system architecture, and faster development through purpose-built tooling.
- Access any data anywhere: With organizations diversifying their application landscape by adopting SaaS applications and building new solutions in the cloud, data is increasingly dispersed across multiple environments. Effectively address your data disparity issues by having the ability to access data from any system with any sort of data in any format.
- Solve endpoint individuality: Each system has its own idiosyncrasies that must be accounted for. This knowledge of the endpoint must include not only how to handle errors, but authentication protocols, load management, performance optimization, transactionality and idempotence. By including such features “in the box,” application integration yields tremendous gains in productivity over coding, and arguably a more consistent level of enterprise-class resiliency.
- Purpose built tooling: Application integration tooling can eliminate the need for integration users to focus on the surrounding infrastructure and more on building the business logic. The inherent value of the runtime can include features such as error recovery, fault tolerance, log capture, performance analysis, message tracing, transactional update and recovery. This allows users to create integration flows quicker without requiring a deep knowledge of the various platforms and domains.
Get the flexibility to run an integration solution as close to your applications with the ability to deploy in any cloud or on-premises system.
Use Case: Wealth Management Advisor Planning
Wealth managers can provide better investment decisions with a holistic view of client portfolios. To do that, they need to collect information from a variety of applications such as savings accounts, guaranteed fixed income products, and mutual funds, each of which have different individualities in terms of error handling, authentication protocols, etc., and formats in which data is stored. With the ability to overcome these differences and quickly combine disparate information through a configuration approach, advisors can improve portfolio recommendations and provide clients with the convenient digital experience they expect from a top-notch financial planning professional.
How does your organization measure up?
Our teams have access to data from applications spread across the enterprise.
Agree
An effective integration solution enables access to data from anywhere by ensuring integration is properly done despite differences in application architecture.
Try App Connect Continue to learn more about opportunities and capabilitiesDisagree
For an organization to be able to respond fast to market challenges, they need to be able to access data from any system in their ecosystem. However this benefit is also possible when the integration solution your organization deploys can address issues of differing application architecture and data formats.
Best Practices: Surviving Data Disparity with Multicloud Integration Continue to learn more about opportunities and capabilitiesOpportunities & Capabilities
Opportunities & Capabilities
The value of integration can be maximized by choosing the right tool but what attributes should an organization look for in an integration solution?
- Flexibility: Having the ability to deploy integration runtimes closer to the applications lowers latency issues and costs and make the runtimes truly lightweight, enabling scalability at a much faster rate. The integration tool also needs to enable application owners to build and manage integration flows independent of integration specialists while also having the flexibility to seamlessly hand off integrations to central IT.
- Ease of use: To ensure that teams have access to the data they need at the right time, enable the application teams to expose APIs/services using simple configuration and pre-built templates for common integration patterns, thereby reducing the dependence on integration specialists.
- Robust platform: A robust platform is one that supports multiple users across business and central IT teams, as well as accommodating integration styles from SOA to FTP, event based, microservices and API. The tool must be able to perform multiple operations on data including routing, transforming, filtering, enriching, monitoring and more with the ability to leverage pre-built connectors to many popular SaaS applications.
Every organization differs in terms of what it requires from an integration solution. At a bare minimum, enterprises should expect their solution to handle multiple clouds, different integration types and be scalable. With IBM App Connect, you can quickly connect any applications and data across a multicloud environment and can scale to support an enterprise of any size. The solution supports a range of integration styles from the traditional SOA to event based, APIs, microservices, allows different user groups to take advantage of the solution based on their skill level, enables you to perform a wide range of operations on data and supports a diverse range of endpoints, protocols and data formats.
Use Case: Vendor management in Retail and CPG Industry
On-boarding new suppliers and integrating them into corporate structures (processes, product catalogues and IT systems) is a challenge for companies and the vendors. With partners managing their data on multiple cloud instances, the integration should span multiple environments to enable application teams to quickly and securely integrate partner information irrespective of the formats they are stored in. With the right integration style, be it event-based, file-based or by surfacing APIs, you can shorten the on-boarding cycle by integrating catalogue and supplier data into current workflow solutions, and send electronic invoices and business documents to all partners.
What do you think?
The integration solution empowers automators/ integrators to deploy simple integration flows for the applications they own without dependence on deep integration specialists.
Agree
An integration solution needs to enable automators and line of business integrators to manage integration flows for the applications they own while enabling central IT to maintain the security and governance of critical data.
Check out the App Connect demo Continue to learn more about best practicesDisagree
A robust integration solution must support multiple users. With simple configuration & pre built templates, users can integration application without requiring deep expertise.
Continue to learn more about best practicesBest Practices
Best Practices
Here are four pointers that you can leverage to improve your organization’s success in multicloud integration:
1. Move to an agile integration architecture approach
An agile architecture approach allows individual integrations to be deployed as separate components or containers enabling an agile, scalable and resilient usage of integration runtimes. Additionally, by allowing integration runtimes to be deployed closer to the application helps reduce latency issues.
2. Choose a platform that supports multiple integration styles
For larger organizations, it is harder to shift existing integration assets to fit to newer integration styles due to challenges associated with finding the right skill set, support for different channels, integration between the two or more integration tools and ensuring that applications fit the new integration style. An integration platform that supports a wide range of integration styles whether it’s event-based, SOA or APIs, helps enterprises conquer any overhead costs and lets them leverage newer technologies.
3. Decentralize ownership of integration
When it comes to integration, developers and deep integration specialists have different requirements. The developer user group would largely benefit from the availability of pre-built connectors and templates that lets them focus on the business logic without worrying about the integration architecture. At the same time, central IT teams should be able to maintain security and governance of their data and control the overall design aspects of connecting applications.
4. Build and manage APIs securely as part of the integration solution:
To derive true value out of application integration, your solution should give you the capability to build and manage APIs in addition to connecting applications across a multicloud environment. By exposing APIs you provide access to information on your systems and with the ability to manage APIs you can control access with the right security configuration, enforce rate limits, track and monitor usage of APIs.
Agile integration architecture gives the freedom to choose the best runtimes & puts the ownership of integrations into the hands of application teams.
Check out these resources for more details on IBM Multicloud Integration capabilities.
Surviving Data Disparity with Multicloud Integration
Learn how to use Multicloud Integration to combat differences in your data.
Agile Architecture
Put the ownership of integrations into the hands of application teams.
