Regardless of the size of a business, it’s important to have the software applications in place to navigate digital transformation. This is especially difficult for small businesses with fewer employees or those that don’t have a proper workflow structure in place for legacy data systems. Proper integration of past and present data is crucial to ensure that there is no redundancy or repetition impacting analyses. This is where an integration platform as a service, or iPaaS, can help businesses of all sizes chart their next steps.
What is an iPaaS?
Before we look at the reasons for using iPaaS solutions, we need to look at what exactly it entails. An integration platform as a service, or iPaaS, is a cloud-based service that integrates data, applications, and processes. iPaaS automates and simplifies data integration, making it easier to connect applications and information across different environments. Using this technology, companies can create and deploy cloud-based integration between applications and data with on-premises and off-premises systems.
A robust iPaaS provides a library of connectors to allow applications to communicate with each other, regardless of where they are hosted. iPaaS generally provides two types of connectors: some for specific applications and others that support a communication protocol. This allows fields and entities to be explored in data management and user interfaces. An iPaaS provider will demonstrate how enterprises can move data between applications, between source applications and target applications, with real-time capabilities. This allows business users to focus on the most important business processes that need to be addressed, with the help of an integration system that emphasizes workflow and transparency between data sources.
1. Exchange data
A proper integration tool via iPaaS is designed to exchange data between applications to streamline business processes and improve customer and employee experience. Through an analysis of these relationships, decision makers are able to make better business decisions. For example, companies can use these capacités d’intégration to link Salesforce Sales Cloud to an on-premises ERP platform or a cloud-based ERP solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365.
By making this connection with the help of artificial intelligence, companies can gain comprehensive views of customer activities and order fulfillment throughout their supply chains. End-users of both systems will be able to easily access application programming interfaces, or APIs, to gather the information they need more immediately.
2. Data migration
An iPaaS provider will promote the ability to migrate data using these tools. This allows organizations to extract information from their legacy systems and integrate it into a cloud-based system for greater flexibility. For example, a small business can map, transform, and move data from an old, archaic data warehouse to an on-premise, cloud-based CRM like Salesforce.
The iPaaS is designed to facilitate data migration. After all, data sources are everywhere. Information vital to processus métier can be found across accounts, contacts, and opportunities in the right order to preserve and create new business relationships. Many companies also use custom fields and objects, which the iPaaS can discover and include in the data migration process.
3. Replicate data regularly image
An iPaaS solution allows companies to regularly replicate data with analysis and archiving processes to help uncover new information. It is also crucial for good data governance and transparency, especially for the planning of quarterly financial reports. The iPaaS creates a single view of formatted information from multiple data sources housed in data silos. For example, companies can replicate data from a CRM system like Salesforce to an on-premises Oracle database.
iPaaS offerings can be a game-changer for businesses of any size. Whether you’re a large vendor or a small vendor, the right data integration system enables an organization of any size to correlate information between its on-premises systems and cloud-based applications better than ever.