As IoT gains ground globally, experts predict the total volume of cloud data to reach 100 zettabytes by 2025. Without efficient data integration, businesses risk the challenges of dealing with disparate applications. If you’re looking to get started with cloud integration platforms but not sure of the benefits, continue reading for more information.
What is a cloud integration platform?
Cloud integration offers businesses a single infrastructure to accommodate an entire ecosystem of software applications. This includes less functional legacy applications to cloud and premise applications, etc. Before cloud integration became mainstream, the general integration process comprised two main options: Businesses could either share in B2B models or leverage their internal staff and resources to integrate applications.
Both approaches require huge budgets to install complex data hardware with multiple data pipelines leading to different endpoints. Cloud integration was introduced as a successor and a solution to SaaS challenges like data security.
What are the benefits of a cloud integration platform?
The benefits of integrating cloud into your business processes are numerous. The most obvious benefit being the synchronization of different applications for a seamless online workflow. We’ve listed a few more benefits below.
1. Operational Efficiency
Managing different cloud environments is time-consuming. Without a cloud integration platform, a business may need to deploy a different template and business process for each independent data system. Cloud integration presents small and large enterprises with a new opportunity to improve operational efficiency.
After merging data silos into a cohesive infrastructure, businesses can generate relevant insights to support workflow automation and improve business value. Data quality is one of the major perks of increasing the adoption of cloud integration platforms. As business demand grows, fast access to quality and relevant data can generate insights for efficient decision-making.
2. Resilience and Agility
Many businesses are still learning lessons and making adjustments to face the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Going into a post-pandemic future, it has become evident that fielding a workflow cast in stone is not the best way to go. Neither is a documented methodology with little room for responsive tweaks.
Businesses need the flexibility to respond to challenges as they arrive. To attain this level of resilience and agility significantly depends on business leaders’ data efficiency and readiness. With easy access to present and historical data from legacy systems, a business can use prescriptive and predictive data analytics to model and test options before onboarding any new solution.
All in all, data’s significance in the world today is unmatched, even more so for modern businesses leaders who need all the agility they can get in navigating the new realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. As new data tech and tools emerge, businesses can have a manageable battle with cloud integration.
3. Internal Communication and Collaboration
The most common response to business expansion involves the introduction of new services in new markets. And utilizing a localized business process to manage microservices worldwide might not be an efficient road to take.
Businesses may have to hire talents from these markets. But for the integration of the cloud, they may have had to install new data servers and networks for data sharing and communication. Today, all that these employees need to function are cloud applications and data infrastructures seamlessly integrated into a single unit.
Cloud integration solutions can help employees from different places to conveniently work over the cloud. Depending on the integration solutions vendor enlisted for your business, employees can access free IT resources to serve customers better and drive up ROI.
4. Reduced IT Costs
The chunk of costs involved in enterprise software goes to operations. Thus, the efforts and people needed to get systems up and maintain them for everyday use are crucial. Cloud integration presents a move away from the need to procure multiple data servers hosted in different physical locations.
Companies using cloud services may only have to pay repetitive fees to third parties rather than installation and maintenance expenses. And with efficient APIs, data teams within an enterprise can replicate resources, which saves on costs for building resources from scratch.
