This guide outlines why every business should integrate iPaaS to improve processes and operations.
Today’s highly competitive business world demands organizations to provide more value to business users using different applications and systems. For this reason, many businesses rely on integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and cloud technologies. IPaaS service providers recorded significant growth in adoption over the last few years, putting the iPaaS market on a consistent growth path.
What is iPaaS?
iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), or systems integration platform as a service, is a cloud solution in which users can develop integration flows that connect cloud, SaaS or on-premises applications. Then deploy without having to install locally or manage any hardware or software.
Gartner describes in its benchmarking model for iPaaS, a series of important functions that give a greater understanding of what makes an Integration Platform as a Service:
- The solution must include tools and technologies that support the execution of integration flows;
- It must support the development and lifecycle management of integrations;
- Manage and monitor application flows;
- Ensuring governance of integrations;
- Include essential cloud capabilities such as multitenancy , elasticity, and self-provisioning;
- Gartner also sees iPaaS as a potential platform for buying, selling, exchanging integration flows between users, service providers and integration providers.
Why is iPaaS the future of integrations?
The demand for systems integration solutions grows as the cloud is driving the digital transformation of companies. New applications and new systems appear every day that need to connect securely, quickly and reliably with companies’ legacy systems. This is where most of the problems for many corporate ITs lie.
With little or no barrier to entry in SaaS adoption, companies are deploying multiple SaaS applications without IT involvement, resulting in hundreds of applications and services in the ecosystem, all isolated and unable to communicate seamlessly with each other.
Parallel to this, the tendency is for systems to be increasingly fragmented. As companies move their applications to the cloud, they run into difficulties in integrating different tools, platforms, technologies and languages.
Although many companies have made great efforts to integrate their internal systems, fighting the “information silos”, this new scenario renews the problem, requiring a new solution adapted to combat the “cloud silos”, the dark side of SaaS integration. This new set of integration problems requires a new platform to solve them. iPaaS presents itself as a virtuous way for the company to reap the benefits of a cloud architecture, in a secure, manageable and future-proof way.
How iPaaS improves business operations
Here’s why your business needs to integrate iPaaS.
It helps eliminate data silos
According to HubSpot, the average employee uses at least eight apps to perform business processes at a faster rate. Often, this creates multiple data silos across an entire ecosystem. Managing data silos poses several challenges to smaller businesses, from efficiency issues to finances. IPaaS integrations afford businesses a single source of truth to accommodate different systems, from premise applications to cloud apps facilitated by technologies.
Eliminating data silos breaks the barriers between different departments across your organization, enabling business users to be more transparent and collaborative with their efforts. Without this integration solution, businesses expose their users to many limitations presented by data silos. Common ones include access difficulty, data duplicates, and inaccurate data insights.
It helps increase productivity
About 80 percent of enterprise operations leaders reveal that iPaas solutions positively impact their operations. Eliminating data silos allows businesses to create a unified solution to manage disparate applications and cloud environments. The 360-degree view of centralizing your data and platform management efforts can lead to reliable and efficient operations.
When your applications talk to each other and exchange data seamlessly, you can get a reliable view of your customers and leads. The productivity benefits of iPaaS can also stem from the time-saving and cost-efficiency perks of iPaaS implementation. IPaaS solutions come with essential cloud features to manage legacy applications and SaaS systems from one central point. This means less time and less budget for capital-intensive maintenance and technical staff recruitment.
It helps enhance security and compliance
IPaaS is a paradigm shift from manual processes to significant automation via a single platform rather than multiple applications. So, end-users can worry less about upgrading the security of their systems now and then. Also, iPaaS doesn’t require hardware or middleware to upgrade or integrate software applications and other operational systems. You simply subscribe to an integration platform that provides automatic and reliable security updates.
It supports low code
The previous decade recorded a boom in enterprise applications, including SaaS, microservices, and artificial intelligence. These systems fueled the world’s digital transformation rate, but several challenges still exist, especially for smaller businesses. For instance, many advanced innovations require specialized business processes and knowledge, and large enterprises stand to gain more than smaller organizations without a robust IT team or budget.
Luckily, iPaaS solutions offer drag-drop and point-click features, making it easier for technical and non-technical users to facilitate complex integrations. Using iPaaS solutions means outsourcing the hard part of integration to your iPaaS vendor. You simply need to create an account and focus on your operations.
It helps with decision-making
The world’s reliance on data keeps growing. But it’s one thing to be the organization that produces huge volumes of data and another to be efficient with data analysis and overall data management. Often, the latter is challenging for many businesses. According to HubSpot, about 80 percent of businesses struggle with several data issues, from data entry duplicates to ineffective insights.
Businesses generating ineffective insights risk making implicating decisions that can hamper their growth. That’s why you need iPaaS solutions to enhance data flow across applications and improve your business intelligence strategies. IPaaS improves access to data from various sources, making it easy to transform relevant insights into effective data-driven decisions.
Final words
All in all, using iPaaS solutions has become more of a necessity as IoT devices gain ground in today’s business world. These use cases can help you if you need more convincing to invest in iPaaS solutions.
