02
Jun

The Forrester Wave Strategic Ipaas And Hybrid Integration Platforms, Q1 2019

An initial installation and setup will be required to register the on-premises gateway agent with Azure gateway cloud service. For instance, Logic Apps can leverage the standard HTTP connectors with the required HTTP headers, and authentication scheme to connect to a secured on-premises REST endpoint published on public internet. On-premises, it may be required to create a dedicated service principal in the local identity server and may be apply local firewall configurations to allow traffic coming from the Logic Apps IP addresses. In case the on-premises system already provides secured web services that are published over the public internet using industry-standard, supported communication protocols, integrations can be accomplished directly from Azure services.

IPaaS platforms offer a cloud-based approach to connecting applications and data. Whether the connection is cloud-to-cloud, ground-to-cloud, or ground-to-ground, an iPaaS lets you synchronize the different aspects of your business faster and more efficiently than traditional solutions like ESB . In fact, modern iPaaS solutions are blowing through app integration barriers by empowering users to connect applications without writing any code – in some cases, allowing you to generate APIs for app integrations in a matter of minutes. The trend toward adoption of cloud is accelerating as organizations look to benefit from the flexibility, agility, scalability, and access to new innovations that most cloud vendors provide. As organizations look to re-architect, re-platform, or re-host some of their applications to cloud, there is the need for complexity reduction and optimization of integrations for better system performance and management.

  • ESB app integrations can cost your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars – even millions – per year.
  • Azure integration offerings started with Service Bus, BizTalk Services , all the way to today’s Azure Integration Services – an iPaaS solution suite of services covering APIs, Messaging, Eventing, and Orchestration capabilities.
  • But what good is low-code app development if you later need to hand-code custom API’s to connect your data to the application or MVP?
  • If your iPaaS offers a “no-code” API generation tool, you can automatically generate APIs to quickly connect thousands of data sources to your applications.
  • Because iPaaS technology is native to the cloud, this integration solution is uniquely suited to handle the high-volume, real-time data integrations – and near-real-time processing demands – of a modern, hybrid-cloud enterprise IT architecture.
  • On-premises, it may be required to create a dedicated service principal in the local identity server and may be apply local firewall configurations to allow traffic coming from the Logic Apps IP addresses.

You can reach him at , @prussom on Twitter, and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/philiprussom. In this article I will shed light on some of the available techniques in implementing Hybrid integration models using Azure along with some context with regards to the organizations decisions within the new integration landscape. IPaaS is cloud-based, to take advantage of cloud elasticity, scalability, flexibility, and low cost. Plus, iPaaS is cloud-based to interface directly with Internet-based applications and data sources .

Of course, it helps if the different tools and technologies work in a frictionless manner, but that is seldom the case, unless the technologies share the same underlying platform. It is worth noting that stored credentials are encrypted on Azure and they are only decrypted by the on-premises agent when connecting to the on-premises data sources. This approach leverages a gateway cloud service on Azure and a light-weight service agent running on-premises.

Azure Hybrid Integration Techniques

The push towards digital transformation and the adoption and consumption of lightweight microservices, advanced analytics, etc. are demanding more from today’s platforms. A lot of existing workloads are on-premises, and many organizations plan to retain some of those on-premises investments long term while gradually plotting a path to the cloud. As long as the integration platform offers a bridge for your applications, adding new solutions and services to your network doesn’t involve significant risk.

hybrid integration platforms vs ipaas

This is a familiar technique to organizations that already have S2S VPN connecting remote locations such as offices around the globe. Blocking factors are limiting organizations from moving partially or completely to the cloud, these factors could be due to compliance regulations, on-premises solution complexity, budget constraints, just to name a few. After reviewing the benefits of iPaaS listed above, you should have a clear picture of how Integration Platform as a Service can support the most important goals and objectives of your enterprise.

So advanced users can program new APIs with iPaaS-empowered features like RBAC, API limits, and more. Certainly, this is assuming that proper security measures were taken on the firewall, network, transport, and message levels, where necessary. Support for the latest enterprise authentication technology, such as OpenID Connect, Active Directory, and OAuth.

Growth In Data, Applications And Users Across The Enterprise

For example, when a public cloud has multiple tools already set up and optimized for the cloud, it prevents users from burning up valuable time and personnel on system integration. In many cases, users can set up interfaces, load data, migrate users, and put the solution into production in a few days. Organizations facing any combination of these evolving business and technology requirements are realizing that their traditional on-premises integration solutions are not a good fit for fast-paced cloud operations or complex hybrid environments.

The technology that has emerged to address today’s requirements is integration-platform-as-a-service — a suite of cloud microservices enabling the development, execution, and governance of integration flows and data pipelines. Traditional integration solutions can’t handle the horizontal scalability needed IoT integrations – where you could be dealing with massive volumes from millions of endpoints. However, the unlimited scalability of a cloud-based iPaaS can handle these workloads with real-time data integrations and near-real-time processing. Organizations are generating data at a geometric pace and without the right tools to integrate and manage the data across various systems, things can quickly run amok. Traditional tools such as Enterprise Server Bus might have their limitations when it comes to managing modern workloads.

Ipaas: A Response To New Business And Technology Requirements

In this article, I talked about the evolution in Microsoft integration landscape with the advent of Azure service offerings, and how organizations were faced with new integration models. For instance, using the Logic Apps integration service environment , a premium tier, is required in order for the hosted logic apps to have VNET access capability which in turn allows it access to on-premise systems through the S2S VPN tunnel. Implementing hybrid integration solution in Azure could be achieved with multiple techniques, in this section I will summarize three main techniques, I will also show possible variations in Azure integration offerings and the on-premises downstream systems. Over the past 7 years or so, Microsoft integration landscape has been evolving going beyond the typical on-premises integration platforms with the paradigm shift introduced by Azure cloud platform and its integration offerings.

Philip Russom is director of TDWI Research for data management and oversees many of TDWI’s research-oriented publications, services, and events. He is a well-known figure in data warehousing and business intelligence, having published over 600 research reports, magazine articles, opinion columns, speeches, Webinars, and more. Before joining TDWI in 2005, Russom was an industry analyst covering BI at Forrester Research and Giga Information Group. He also ran his own business as an independent industry analyst and BI consultant and was a contributing editor with leading IT magazines. Before that, Russom worked in technical and marketing positions for various database vendors.

hybrid integration platforms vs ipaas

IPaaS connections are ideal for multi-tenant applications because they reduce integration redundancies while offering rapid scalability for onboarding new tenants. As cloud services, they also eliminate the massive hardware and software requirements that a multi-tenant architecture could require. If your iPaaS offers a “no-code” API generation tool, you can automatically generate APIs to quickly connect thousands of data sources to your applications. Your iPaaS can also serve as a proxy that communicates with other APIs – to plug in additional features and capabilities like business intelligence, billing, or marketing tools.

Modernization is the allure of reaping the benefits that the cloud platform brings, such as productivity gains, cost savings, global reach, the availability of powerful service offerings. Azure integration offerings started with Service Bus, BizTalk Services , all the way to today’s Azure Integration Services – an iPaaS solution suite of services covering APIs, Messaging, Eventing, and Orchestration capabilities. To fulfill its aggressive integration goals, an iPaaS suite must support all modern and traditional application programming interfaces and include special functionality for managing API portfolios and performance. This powerful gateway offers a security layer, API orchestration, and logging capabilities. Moreover, the iPaaS manages the connections and maintains the connected data for an affordable monthly and yearly subscription fee.

New Integration Landscape

Furthermore, users migrating data and applications to the cloud need richer cloud-based integration toolsets to handle the migration and support daily native-cloud integration flows. The modern enterprise landscape is evolving fast, and businesses are looking to become more efficient wherever they can, whether it be through the optimization of existing processes or adoption of better, faster, and/or simpler technologies (i.e., legacy modernization). As an example, take a customer that wants to speed up and modernize the partner onboarding process. They might be using traditional Electronic Data Interchange and are looking to simplify EDI handling with a modern B2B gateway, or they might be considering moving to an API-based system. Or, consider organizations that are looking to modernize their on-premises enterprise data warehouses by migrating them to cloud-based data warehouses, and need the right types of cloud integration, ingestion, and data cataloging tools and connectors to effectively make the transition. If integration and data management are not already part of your technology and IT operations strategy, they soon will be.

Complementing them with an integration platform as a service that works purely in a cloud environment and offers better scalability and range of integration capabilities is emerging as a better approach. This technique creates a secured bridge that facilitates integrations between the supported Azure services and on-premises data sources without introducing intrusive changes to the organization’s firewall or the on-premises data source security scheme. Let’s imagine the cloud adoption progress as an imaginary spectrum; starting with the on-premises model at the far left, all the way to the cloud native model at the far right, and in-between is the hybrid integration model with different levels of cloud adoption progress. A Hybrid Integration Platform provides a framework for laying down a comprehensive integration and data management strategy across the enterprise in the ever-evolving hybrid, multi-cloud world. It looks to bring together a cohesive set of integration and data management tools to bridge on-premises and cloud.

Ipaas Benefit: Low

Organizations are looking to avoid the pitfalls of spaghetti, hand-coded, and file-based integrations which are not scalable or easy to maintain. Another technique is to leverageOn-premises data gateway which provides a secure connectivity between supported on-premises data sources and selected Azure cloud services that support it. Despite the focus on the cloud, iPaaS also provides integration microservices that can be tapped by on-premises applications and tools. In fact, organizations with iPaaS typically use it as a nexus point that provides rich integration and interoperability for the many platforms of a hybrid data and application environment. After all, data travels into a hybrid environment, as well as among its constituent platforms and tools. Because iPaaS technology is native to the cloud, this integration solution is uniquely suited to handle the high-volume, real-time data integrations – and near-real-time processing demands – of a modern, hybrid-cloud enterprise IT architecture.

With its ability to quickly synchronize data cloud-to-cloud, ground-to-cloud, and ground-to-cloud, iPaaS tech could be the key to overcoming your big data growth hurdles. In today’s world of business, it is paramount to know the many iPaaS benefits. Modern enterprises require a host of applications to manage their bookkeeping, inventory, marketing, and more. Finding powerful applications to cover these needs isn’t very difficult, but building the integrations that synchronize data between these solutions can be costly and labor-intensive while requiring enormous amounts of technical expertise.

In this respect, your iPaaS represents a predictable, manageable expense – and you only pay for the service level you need without incurring a large up-front investment. It is worth mentioning that in order for an Azure service to leverage the VPN connectivity, the service will need to support VNET integration capability, this feature is usually included in the premium plans of Azure services that support this capability. Hybrid Integrations provides a compromise, where the core on-premises hybrid integration platforms investments are still maintained while its features are being extended by the new cloud service capabilities. E.C. Barton used the DreamFactory iPaaS to give their CRM systems real-time updating capabilities. Barton locations across the United States, their enterprise CRM system instantly synchronizes to reflect this activity. Another great option in this space is AppInstitute’s easy to use app creation platform, they also offer insightful tips on how to create a successful no-code app.

Data Digest: Data Governance And Stewardship

But what good is low-code app development if you later need to hand-code custom API’s to connect your data to the application or MVP? This is where the API generation tools of your Integration Platform as a Service can help. ESB app integrations can cost your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars – even millions – per year. That’s not to mention the price and maintenance fees of on-site hardware that these solutions require. As you begin building your HIP, consider a phased implementation that looks to reuse parts of what your organization already has and complementing that with technologies such as iPaaS for new projects. The HIP may evolve over time as new requirements and projects emerge and you may simply need to test and plug-in new tools into the core framework.

Fast, Easy Integrations

For many organizations, the integration landscape is within the hybrid area, with the modernization promise and the blocking factors as the two opposing forces influencing cloud adoption decision and progress. IPaaS suites tend to include many integration tool types through a single console, including those for data integration, quality, https://globalcloudteam.com/ and master data management as well as application integration, orchestration, and process management. The unified toolset boosts developer productivity, consistent standards, and broad curation. Furthermore, it fosters the modern design of data flows and pipelines that incorporate multiple forms of integration functions.

I also summarized three main techniques to implement hybrid integration model in Azure with the support of dedicated Azure services and technologies. Almost any data or application integration function you can think of is now a service. Users migrating data and applications to the cloud need richer cloud-based integration toolsets such as those in integration-platform-as-a-service . Build multi-tenant applications – where your software runs as a single instance that services multiple customers or “tenants.” This could be a software-as-a-service application that your build to service millions of customers through a web portal – like SalesForce. Or, it could be a custom business application that benefits multiple departments in your organization. Many organizations might put together an Integration Strategy and Enablement Team to do this.

In other words, it eliminates the labor, costs, hardware, and time commitment required to develop traditional integrations. The push for standardization, simplification, and optimization of systems will only grow as the need for integration becomes more pervasive. Finally, there is no absolute right or wrong model, organizations’ integration solutions will possibly evolve during its lifetime among these models at different stages. The progress level of cloud adoption will generally depend on the influence of the two opposing forces in shaping the organization’s decision at each stage, hopefully along a strategic direction. Vendor products for iPaaS vary, but the comprehensive ones support the many functions of both data integration and application integration. This is because — in addition to data integration — many users need a data-driven toolset for migrating and consolidating application data, plus managing data from software-as-a-service apps.

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. 45% of businesses have already integrated “some of their big data” processes with the cloud. Below, we’ve outlined eight business-transforming benefits of iPaaS technology. But first, let’s define what iPaaS technology is and how organizations are using it. Find the lowest risk and lowest cost path to modernize your on-premises applications to the Cloud.