Digital growth requires you to expand your IT landscape with more software, leading to more integrations and API connections. Yet the more integrations you create using custom code, multiple plugins, or integration partners, the more entangled your IT landscape will likely become, and therefore, more complicated and costly to maintain. The resulting data silos and integration errors are bound to destabilize your IT infrastructure, making it harder to monitor, troubleshoot, and maintain the stability of your integrations, slowing down your digital growth.
What are the main challenges regarding IT infrastructural insurance?
- Unreliable faulty integrations
- Handling massive orders
- Dealing with IT ecosystem crashes
- Preparing fail-safes in case your IT systems get hacked
A few questions to ask yourself:
How should you organize and design your business' IT landscape and integrations in order to seamlessly manage and process huge amounts of data? How could you ensure IT infrastructural stability and data integrity as you keep integrating more software and real-time API services to ensure digital growth? How would you prevent data breaches, hacks or system crashes in an ever-expanding IT landscape? And last but not least, with machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other new systems about to go mainstream, how will you ensure that your IT ecosystem keeps up with the times while maintaining business continuity?
The solution:
The Alumio iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) is a secure, cloud-native integration platform that helps you connect any two or more software, systems, APIs, plug-ins, or data points, via a user-friendly low-code interface. Among others, these are the key benefits that the Alumio iPaaS provides that ensure IT infrastructural insurance, especially when it comes to massive orders during peak seasons or unexpected back-office failures.
Did you know? Using an iPaaS reduces the business impact of integration errors or API conflicts
Integration errors are bound to happen since it is difficult to ensure 100% data quality and compatibility when integrating different software, systems, or APIs. By automating the logging and monitoring of your integrations, the Alumio iPaaS interface helps you detect and resolve integration errors quickly while allowing you to easily modify and improve your integrations. More importantly, thanks to its user-friendly low-code interface, the Alumio iPaaS ‘Support and Monitor’ cockpit can be easily learned and piloted by professionals without coding skills, saving you the need to hire developers to solve integration problems. This doesn’t just reduce the negative business impact of integration management challenges but it also prevents hiring difficulties, since you no longer need custom coding experts to manage and troubleshoot your integrations.
Centralizing your integrations with an iPaaS helps ensure business continuity
Centralizing all your data and integrations visibly on one interface, the Alumio iPaaS helps to prevent data silos from forming and makes it easy for you to expand your IT landscape in an organized and secure manner. Above all, an iPaaS allows you to adapt to changes in a flexible and scalable way, making it easy for you to add new connections or modify and replace old ones without any loss of data integrity.
To insure against key IT threats such as data loss, security breaches, and system crashes that are liable to paralyze business operations, the Alumio iPaaS can be configured to buffer your data on a secure cloud space. By doing this, it doesn’t just provide remote access to your data in case of any data loss from your on-premises systems due to fire, water, or accidental damage, but it also allows you to migrate your data securely, redeploy your systems remotely, and easily track your data security via the aforementioned automated logging. It also helps connect and centralize your data from multiple systems, software, or files on a secure and central cloud space, allowing you to manage your entire IT landscape via one central hub.
Resolve IT hacks and crashes by changing software easily and with 360-degree insights
In the case of potential integration failures or if your ERP crashes or gets hacked, data loss is a serious problem that can threaten your IT operations. The Alumio iPaaS helps you deal with potential data loss through its capability to cache data, but more importantly, it is a crucial piece of middleware that helps you quickly remove problematic software and connect new software to your integrations, via its easy-to-use low-code interface. Being able to transfer data from other software or from the cached software ensures business continuity while troubleshooting or improving integrations.
With digitalization evolving rapidly and with there always being newer systems or software for you to connect with for better business processes, being able to create fast, flexible and scalable integrations is a must. If you attempt to add, remove or change integrations using custom-code, plugins, or integration partners, it is most likely to result in an unpredictably costly and time-consuming project.
On the other hand, the Alumio iPaaS allows you to quickly add new connections between APIs, plug-ins, E-commerce platforms, ERP systems, PIM systems, CRM systems, and more, without any code and via its easy-to-use integration platform. In other words, if any particular integration is slowing down your digital growth, you can easily replace or remove it without any data loss, and at the same time, you can now experiment with easily connecting newer software, systems, plugins, or APIs to see what works best for your business.
Moreover, Alumio’s automated monitoring and logging system helps you detect and resolve destabilizing integration errors from occurring in the first place. What’s more, the Alumio iPaaS offers 360-degree insights on your customers and connections, allowing you to adjust connections, determine which new integrations you should add or replace, or customizations you need to create for better customer satisfaction. To complement this, Alumio provides a powerful integration toolbox that makes it easy for you to customize or create new integrations based on your changing business needs.
Process huge data loads and normalize data across integrations with an iPaaS
Apart from helping you easily integrate with two or more systems or software, the Alumio iPaaS also works as a middleware to effectively manage potentially big data exchanges that can take place as you expand your integrations, or during peak season. In order to process huge orders and expand your integrations for digital growth, your IT infrastructure will need the capacity to handle a growing amount of data.
The Alumio iPaaS doesn’t just provide a buffer (cache) and dedicated scalable cloud power for your integrations, but it also helps normalize huge data loads across integrations using data entities like JSON, CSV, and XML in all kinds of data structures. Providing an intermediate standard for many data entity types (e.g. orders, products, credit memos, people, etc. that can be found in Alumio entity schemas), the iPaaS helps reduce the general complexity of configuring data flows.
To add to this, Alumio’s queueing mechanism prevents your IT systems from overloading with data peaks, by breaking data down into many queues and sub-queues that can be processed chronologically, as required by an endpoint. Via such effective data management tools, the Alumio iPaaS makes it significantly easier to maintain data integrity and prevent integration errors, regardless of how much you expand or modify your IT connections.
How does a Microservices architecture help to enhance IT performance?
Speaking of handling huge data loads, massive orders during peak demand or Sales season are likely to overload your integration software or APIs, leading to crashes and serious business losses.
It’s important to have an integration solution that’s based upon the Microservices software architecture principle. This is a digital architectural design pattern that breaks up the software into its individual components or features, allowing you to scale up individual software features as per requirement or demand. In context to security, if one particular feature of the connected software causes problems, the Microservices architecture prevents the problem from affecting or crashing the rest of the software, or integrated software. Therefore, using an integration platform like the Alumio iPaaS to integrate two or more software enabled with Microservices architecture, helps to organize centralized tooling for your integrations and helps ensure scalable performance and better security.
The API-based approach of an iPaaS simplifies troubleshooting integration errors
APIs (application programming interfaces) allow different applications to easily communicate and transfer information between each other. The Alumio iPaaS adopts an API-led approach that doesn’t just make it easier for you to connect with more systems, software, or data points, but it also allows each connected software or system to be managed independently via one central, low-code integration platform.
Most importantly, in case the API of one software or system is creating a conflict or integration errors, the Alumio iPaaS helps quickly detect and troubleshoot the conflicting API without causing the entire system to crash, making it easy to isolate and troubleshoot the integration errors with minimal business impact and without affecting continuity. The extensive logging that the Alumio iPaaS implements help detect API conflicts and integration errors quickly on its visual low-code interface, helping you troubleshoot hiccups and system failures effectively without writing complex code.
The Alumio iPaaS offers compliant, authenticated, and secure integrations
Allowing centralized access to all data from all connected systems across all integrations, Alumio helps your IT landscape comply better with privacy legislation like GDPR, SOC2, CCPA, FERPA, and HIPAA. Providing secure access to various systems, Alumio offers essential authentications such as Basic authentication, Bearer token authentication, Oauth 2.0 authentication, Query param authentication, Wsse authentication, and NTLM authentication. The Alumio iPaaS also allows you to deploy secure integrations based on market standards with a single-tenant environment, with a fixed IP and the option to configure VPN tunnels.
All of these advantages offered by the Alumio iPaaS help make it easy for you to sustainably scale up your integrations in a way that is quick, cost-effective and future-proof. In other words, if you’re looking to expand your digital growth rapidly, the best way to avoid integration inconveniences and ensure IT Infrastructural Insurance is by using an iPaaS.
Thus, centralizing the management of your integrations is the most effective solution to ensure infrastructural insurance for your IT landscape. Designed specifically for this purpose, an iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service), which is a next-gen version of an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), is a cloud-based middleware solution for creating integrations quickly, cost-effectively, and sustainably. An iPaaS helps untangle your integrations, keeps all your data secure and accessible in one central hub, and makes it easy for you to create an insured future-proof IT landscape.
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