Modern digital business initiatives are forcing organizations to adopt contemporary architectures which are founded on non-monolithic models, owing to the large-scale adoption of cloud, digitalization, and IoT. Firms who employed API and EDI-first technologies as their strategy for handling integration are now realizing that they cannot comprehensively address the emerging and highly complex integration scenarios.
Why Do You Need a Hybrid Integration Platform to Handle Integration Challenges in a Cloud-First World?
The Rise of Hybrid Cloud
Enterprises today rely on the use of the cloud for operational innovation and efficiencies, application modernization, agility, rapid scalability, revenue and business model innovation, high responsiveness, and high availability. A lot of systems along with a large portion of processing, systems of engagement, and systems of insight are moving to the cloud.
Consequently, data, applications, and process integrations should be able to support both on-premise systems and cloud-based applications. A cloud-enabled business model not only enables IT but also other business users to respond to real business opportunities by forging closer ties with many customers and creating customer touchpoints.
Digital Transformation and Internet of Things (IoT)
The digital transformation era has brought a major shift in customer demands and requirements. Capabilities such as artificial intelligence can help companies answer to its customer queries at the speed of business. It is likely to require seamless connectivity with data from customers. Internet of Things complicated matters further. Organizations are focused on using IoT as a driver of incremental revenue streams based on new products and services. It requires them to save costs and improve productivity, cut down operational overhead, and optimize operational efficiencies. What makes things more complex is the exponential rise in data volume and velocity stemming from thousands of endpoints – that needs to be integrated, transformed and syndicated to various systems of engagements to derive appropriate insights.
Traditional integration solutions are unable to address this level of complexity. The need of the hour is to move toward what Gartner calls a hybrid integration platform or HIP. Introducing a HIP system in place means that organizational models must also change to keep pace. The conventional IT- controlled centralized integration team need to shift toward an approach that supports HIP-enabled integrations by lines of business, subsidiaries, application development teams, and eventually business users.
Disconnected Silos of Data in Cloud or On-Premises
Owing to the rise of hybrid cloud deployments and increasing cloud-based technologies, companies need to face disconnected data silos and fragmentation of processes. Data is scattered across on-premise and cloud, and this impacts organizations’ ability to extract insights from it to make proactive business decisions. Hybrid integration platforms help companies empower all personas to integrate data in on-premises devices, the cloud, mobile devices and IoT devices.
Ability to Facilitate Self-Service Integration or Citizen Integrator Capabilities
With digitalization at its peak, companies need to have agility, user interface and customer experience (CX) capabilities, dynamic integration, and velocity. Conventional integration systems cannot meet the scale of connectivity required to support digital business. The result is to enable a system that empowers all types of integration personas from LOBs, departments, application teams to business users while allowing the established team of integration specialists to deliver heavy-duty, systematic integration.
Related White Paper: Six Secrets for Building a Great Hybrid IT Integration Architecture
Due to the aforementioned reasons and more, hybrid integration platforms are taking over as the new choice for integration projects. According to Gartner, almost 20% of organizations are beginning to implement a bimodal, self-service integration approach via Hybrid Integration Platforms (HIP) to enable seamless connectivity across the enterprise while ensuring security, flexibility, scalability, and manageability.