What is iPaaS Cloud Data Integration?

Enterprises are constantly churning out applications, many of which are chosen by business units seeking “best of breed” and deployed as silos – but still need to be integrated with other apps, and share data across the organization. And business-critical processes – such as quote-to-cash, order fulfillment, item management, procure-to-pay, and more – span a variety of applications across multiple departments. Not to mention the growing volume of data from all data types and formats, flowing between applications.

Traditionally, enterprises integrated their business processes via a combination of custom programming, middleware, and/or enterprise application integration (EAI) implementations, like service-oriented architecture (SOA). But while such solutions worked fine, they typically took a lot of time to create and were expensive to run. They also left enterprises reliant on specific data silos, meaning that data couldn’t be shared among different consumers.

iPaaS cloud data integration tools standardize how new applications are added and existing applications are integrated to an enterprise, making it easier to move all types of data across applications, while providing the necessary integration functionality as well.

Integration is standardized in the sense that iPaaS cloud data integration solutions dynamically monitor, maintain, and update processes across applications, which are constantly being added, deleted, or changed. When done right, iPaaS cloud data integration enables both data consumers and technical engineers the ability to easily build, manage, and maintain integrations.

iPaaS Cloud data integration is a single integrated platform that delivers a consistent process for data integration between all relevant apps in an enterprise, whether on premise or in the cloud.

The platform is hosted and managed on the cloud, and provided as a service. Subscribers need to choose the applications and services they need to integrate, and orchestrate the data flows between them. Everything else is the responsibility of the cloud provider, including data governance, feature updates, hardware management, security, and software fixes when necessary.

Pricing for the service typically comes in the form of a monthly subscription fee or a pay-as-you-go model.

iPaaS cloud data integration providers usually offer a wide range of integration scenarios, especially targeting highly regulated enterprises. The service allows for real-time data exchange between SaaS apps, as well as between SaaS apps and other cloud-based applications, SaaS, and on-premise applications.

A growing number of enterprises count on iPaaS to manage applications and data more easily, integrate legacy systems more quickly, and resolve integration issues more thoroughly.

The top use cases of iPaaS cloud data integration include:

• Customer 360, for a trusted, holistic perspective of customer data, in real time.
• Data masking, that protects data at rest, in use, and in transit
• Test data management, that provisions high-quality test data, in minutes, on demand.
• Data migration, that moves data and digital business operations into the cloud.
• Legacy application modernization, that systematically moves legacy application functionality and data from old to new environments.

iPaaS cloud data integration enables highly-regulated industries – like telco and media, financial services, and healthcare – integrate data and systems quickly, securely, and in complete compliance, by using data making tools as necessary.

Here are the core capabilities of a cloud data integration platform:

• Data connectivity
  Data connectivity ingests data from any source, in any delivery mode, and then transforms it for delivery, to any target, in any format.
• Data and application integration
  Data integration creates and manages scalable data pipelines between source and target systems, for operational and analytical use cases.
• Data orchestration
  Data orchestration unifies, transforms, and enriches data, from any source systems into any target applications, quickly and easily.
• Data governance
  Data governance ensures data quality, enforces data privacy and security controls, and makes the data easily accessible at enterprise scale.
• Data catalogue and data lineage
  A data catalog is built into the company's data fabric to inventory and classify data assets, and visually map information supply chains to show data lineage.

Beyond the above, the platform must be able to handle lifecycle management and monitoring (management of the cloud integrations), error handling, and API management.

In short, the right cloud data integration solution should be flexible and scalable enough to meet the extremely demanding requirements of modern data management.

Enterprise iPaaS requires whole a new approach, coined “EiPaaS” by Gartner. EiPaaS needs to simplify the creation of complex integrations, and to shift integration management from IT to the data consumers, by providing clear-cut guidelines.

An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a layer of middleware that manages and shares, data and application components, across the organization. Although housed on premise, ESB systems can facilitate cloud integrations, and mimic hybrid cloud environments.

iPaaS takes over where ESB leaves off, especially in terms of enterprise-critical capabilities, as reviewed in the following table:

For enterprises that need to be flexible about future scaling, or adopting a new data integration architecture, iPaaS is clearly the better choice.

A latest approach to EiPaaS is based on a data products.

Data Product Platform is the only iPaaS platform deployed in a public cloud (as well as offering an on-premise, and hybrid deployment options).

An enterprise cloud data integration (iPaaS) platform is highly effective because it delivers:

• Patented entity-based technology
  When data is organized by business entity, and managed by Micro-Database™ (for example, one Micro-Database for every customer instance), performance is unparalleled.
• Multi-use data schemas
  An enterprise can build the data schema once, and use it for many different use cases, such as customer 360, data pipelining, test data management, and more.
• Modular, open, and scalable architecture
  Data integration, transformation, enrichment, preparation, and delivery are aggregated in a single, extensible platform.
• Split-second, end-to-end, response times
  Enterprise data fabric is built to support high-scale, high-volume operations in real time, with bi-directional data movement between sources and targets.
• Data management for operational and analytical workloads
  Integrated, trusted data is delivered in a split second into consuming applications, or pipelined into data lakes and data warehouses for analytical purposes.

There are multiple vendors offering enterprise-grade app/data integration tools solutions. The following table lists the pros and cons of the industry’s leading iPaaS cloud data integration vendors: