What is an Integration Platform?
An integration platform provides you with several integration software, all of which could be termed middleware products. Also, that would help enable the user to do the following:
- It helps develop integration governance and security that could help create diverse systems, applications, and other services.
- Rapid API creation and lifecycle management help ensure that the solution meets various hybrid integration requirements.
An integration platform is a solution that provides centralized access to core data and APIs with their microservices and helps stay cloud native. It allows the development of various systems' integrations, strategies, and APIs. It reduces the effort for point-to-point integrations and decouples the connections between sources and destinations by providing a platform for integration—deployments of the integrations on the security with the policies and SLAs that the chosen provider adheres to. So, it can reduce the complexity of maintenance and communication channels generated by point-to-point integrations.
DevSecOps pipeline ensures that security is monitored throughout the life cycle of software development. Click to explore about our, Building DevSecOps Pipeline on AWS
These Days the number of iPAAS solutions has risen to prominence and helped many organizations boost their integrations. So these solutions have started providing a platform essentially as a service. So they are following up on the idea that building a could-native integration platform is often the best way to integrate systems and accelerate your transformation.
Why it is important?
If you have used a cloud service, you must have used an integration platform before. It offer tremendous flexibility and help build cost-effective, high-performant, secure platforms that can easily be integrated using those cloud services. Hence they ensure the accessibility of your application everywhere and help keep your data at the center of your business.
Your cloud provider manages your underlying infrastructure, which gives you freedom from the in-house teams to focus on evolving your platform instead of getting messed up in infrastructure management. By using all this wealth of tools, services, and software components offered by your cloud platform provider, you can build the best integration platform and reduce your software engineering workloads in your organization, quickly developing new system integrations.
Cloud Native strategy gives you a unique platform for modernizing existing and legacy systems - an essential element of digital transformation. It helps you get away from legacy systems by moving away from architectures that don't allow flexibility and rapid change, reducing technical debt and duplication.
An application or service release technique that shifts the incoming traffic from an older version of the application or microservice to a newer version. Click to explore about our, Blue-Green Deployment on AWS
Difference between PAAS and iPAAS?
Although Platform as a service and Integrated Platform as a service seem almost identical, their meaning also feels the same. But when understood from their functional perspective, they are different from each other.
PaaS focuses on the part of a development project rather than an entire project or infrastructure. iPAAS, on the other hand, provides integration solutions that provide connectivity between well-defined websites, interfaces, data sources, and applications. PAAS is suitable for companies building more developer-rich products and hence can get integrated platforms built. On the contrary, smaller companies work with many hosted applications and are required to do integrations between those applications. Hence it could be said that PAAS tools require skilled developers and good coding skills and experience. Whereas iPAAS tools could be used by the teams with less coding experience.
What are the benefits?
The benefits of Integration Platform as a service are listed below:
Makes data flow between your application
It gives you an option for allowing your data to flow between different applications. It can import and export resources for the target stream of your applications.
Data Transformation
It allows you to transform your data as per the application's source and destination requirements.
Time and money efficient
Its most significant advantage is that it is faster than the traditional methods used to integrate applications and data.
Improve the customer experience
It improves the customer experience by resolving their problems quickly and allowing them to access data easily.
Integration monitoring and management
A web-based console provided by iPAAS helps you deploy and execute integrations from one central location. You can monitor your application from there, which helps you plan, start and stop integrations.
Continuous Integration is DevOps fashions allow developers to implement integrations sooner and regularly.Click to explore about our, Best Practices for Enterprise DevOps Transformation
What are the Use Cases?
Integration Platform as a service has various use cases with various integration needs across various platforms and data sources. Here are the briefs of some of the use cases.
Integrations in B2B business
Without the need for custom integrations or standard API. iPAAS provides the support for handling the B2B integrations with diverse 3rd party partners and providers. It also enables security standards enforcement and audits for B2B data flows.
Integrations between data sources
For managing the data format transformations and for validating the real-time data, iPAAS provides an alternative to traditional data transfers using batch scripts.
Integrations of microservices
For enabling the organizations to go by the microservices architecture approach, iPAAS plays a good part by automatically generating and publishing APIs to support microservices which helps in reducing the need to design and build the APIS on our own.
Big Data Integrations
Big data flows typically involve data lakes, warehouses, and analytical and visualization tools. iPAAS could help handle complex integrations within the big data ecosystem and business intelligence.
Multiple cloud integrations
The complex integrations between public and private cloud resources and services involve unique data stores in many different locations and formats for creating, implementing, and managing such complex integrations among different clouds.
Application-to-application integrations
For connecting the system and its applications with their data located on the cloud or on-premise, the iPAAS helps in automatically implementing interfaces and data flows to establish and manage each integration.
Assembly lines are used to organize day to day tasks from all teams that collaborate for the project's dignity. Click to explore about our, DevOps Assembly Lines
Conclusion
Talking about the future of the Integration Platform as a service, it could easily be said that it's bright as enterprises continue to embrace microservices-based applications, cloud-based services, and data-driven approaches to their solutions. iPAAS will continue to overlap with the areas where new trends in enterprise business strategies are coming, like RPA and BPA.
As iPAAS products continue to address the complex integrations involving solutions with AI, ML, NLP, expanding cloud services, and multi-data resources with serverless deployments, iPAAS is going to be the center solution making it all possible with ease. As the iPAAS focuses more on business workflow automation and one-click integration capabilities, drag-and-drop process linking and low-code functionalities are essential. Well, still, it cant be clearly said that the cloud will continue to rely on the iPAAS products, or the cloud services will be more inclined toward native integration services.
More enterprises will continue to bring about the new iPAAS integration solutions. However, it is interesting to see how the organizations still discontinue to attach with traditional integration methods or take the iPAAS to a new level.
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