Tech Lover 9

We live in a world that is always on, always active, always connected, and always changing. In our global marketplace, the connected enterprise has a competitive advantage. The ability to integrate the value chain and share information beyond the edge of the enterprise — in the cloud — with global offices, customers, suppliers and other value chain partners can significantly improve operational efficiency. Integrating systems, applications and data in the cloud can transform an enterprise. Among the potential benefits are transaction-processing cost reductions, greater customer satisfaction, companies working more effectively with suppliers, enhanced order accuracy and improvements to an organization’s agility so it can respond quickly to new challenges.

But it’s not easy to do. 

That’s why mid-market companies and enterprises are turning to cloud services brokerages (CSBs). The purpose of a cloud services brokerage is to manage the complexity of the growing number and types of multi-enterprise integrations. This can mean integrating hundreds of external business partners with internal business applications, processes, services and data. The integration brokerage model unleashes the potential of the cloud as a platform for multi-enterprise partnerships designed to deliver new and innovative products and services to customers. But, doing integration in the cloud is complex.

Cloud Integration and How an Integration Brokerage Fits

Data integration is critical for companies that need to combine systems and databases — for example, after a merger or acquisition — or need to link legacy systems to new business applications. This task can be daunting, particularly in small- to medium-sized businesses where IT staffs and budgets may be constrained. Several models for cloud-based data integration services exist, including:

• Cloud-to-cloud: Services and integration from outside-the-firewall hosted systems or applications to other outside-the-firewall hosted systems or applications.
• Cloud-to-on-premise: Services/integration from on-premise, back-end systems or applications to outside-the-firewall hosted systems or applications.
• Application-to-application (through the cloud platform): Services/integration from on-premise, back-end systems or applications through a cloud platform provider (public, private or hybrid cloud).

It’s not always feasible for businesses to move all of their data integration functions to the cloud. Instead, some may prefer to “dip their toes” into the cloud. The trick is figuring out which toes to dip in — or, more explicitly, which business processes to move. You want to be confident that your data integration processes will work as well in the cloud as they do on-premise. To help ensure a successful transition, choose cloud services providers that specialize in data integration and that can meet your technical and regulatory requirements.

With a cloud services brokerage, you can test the waters for a relatively low cost by moving one or more of your data integration projects to the cloud while leaving the rest on-premise. Establishing new integration processes in the cloud or moving customer-facing B2B (business-to-business) processes to the cloud is much easier than moving more complex back-office integration processes, unless the vendor that you are working with already has experience and success working with the systems that you need integrated. In many cases, the model for solving integration challenges is understood and can be applied to your scenario.

The key to deciding what to move hinges on a number of technical and business concerns, including the simplification needed for processing, the cost of data translation, connectivity, performance, scalability and security, all of which must be fully vetted with cloud services providers.

Data translation: To overcome the data translation/transformation challenge, you can adopt a hybrid approach: Existing data translation stays on-premise, while new or modified processes get implemented in the cloud. Alternatively, you can find a provider that can manage your data transformation/translation at a lower cost.

Connectivity: Cloud providers build their IT infrastructure for high availability and disaster recovery. Loss of connectivity within the cloud is actually very rare and companies are often surprised to see that their own history of downtime is worse than that of cloud providers.

Scalability: Interoperability and scalability are key benefits of partnering with an integration broker. Companies can start small and expand to new cloud-based projects as their business processes improve and are refined.

Performance: Cloud computing can never achieve the same low latency as servers on the same LAN segment, but the difference will be negligible if the bandwidth is adequate. Make sure that your requirements are addressed when your data integration solution is being re-architected for the cloud.
Security: Find out how the cloud provider protects sensitive data, including data in transit to and from the cloud; stored data; and how it destroys sensitive data at the end of its lifecycle. Also find out how it manages identity and access controls.

Expert Help
While many moving parts are associated with transitioning your data integration processes to the cloud, the weight of having to figure out how to assemble those parts to make them hum doesn’t have to rest solely with you. The right cloud services brokerage will have both the data integration solutions and the expertise to work through the technical issues to help you find the best solution.