The amount of cloud applications and software solutions that businesses need to connect with to digitalize business processes is rapidly increasing. Connecting new software or data points to your IT landscape traditionally involves using plugins or creating complex point-to-point integrations with custom code. However, while plugins offer limited integration features and increase third party dependency, creating integrations using custom code is both expensive and extensive. Additionally, integrations created by custom code can only be managed or modified by developers or integration specialists. Connecting to new software or systems with custom code is as good as starting an entirely new point-to-point integration project, with all costs and complexities involved.
Connecting software through these traditional methods is not scalable, rapidly slows down time to market, and increases the total cost of ownership. Having an agile, adaptable, future-proof software integration solution is critical. Quelling the complexities of creating point-to-point integrations, an iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) is a next-gen, cloud-based integration solution. It provides many benefits that help simplify how system integrations can be fast, flexible and future-proof.
The key benefits of an iPaaS:
- Understand and create integrations yourself
- Experience faster time to market
- Get full data accessibility
- Improve data security and error detection
- Unlock data silos and centralize integrations
- Enable business scalability
- Ensure business continuity
- Increase ROI and reduce TCO
Continue reading to get an in-depth insight into all the benefits of an iPaaS or read all about ‘What is an iPaaS’ to understand how an Integration Platform as a Service works.
Discover the benefits of using an iPaaS
How an integration platform helps accelerate your business' digital growth
An iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) helps significantly simplify how users create, monitor, and manage software integrations via a user-friendly interface without any coding expertise. Acting as centralized intermediary or middleware solution that helps connect two or multiple software, systems, or data sources with minimal IT support, an iPaaS is:
- a cloud-based software solution
- a low-code platform for creating integrations
- a centralized hub for seamless data sharing across all integrations
However, while that’s only scratching the surface when it comes to exploring the advantages of using an iPaaS, here are some of the critical benefits of an iPaaS for rapidly digitalizing businesses:
1. Understand & create integrations yourself
Implement integration automation tools via a user-friendly interface
As a cloud-basef integration platform, the iPaaS makes self-service integrations possible. Being fully accessible via a web-based dashboard, it provides a user-friendly interface that business users, data experts or junior developers can access and operate.
In other words, an iPaaS makes it easy for non-developers or data experts to create, configure and manage software integrations, without any coding expertise. This frees senior developers - who are rare and expensive resources of any IT team - to focus on architecture and complex custom coding problems. It is important to note, that some iPaaS solutions like Alumio also provide advanced mappers and transformers that developers can use to create custom integrations that are reusable and can be replicated across different systems..
” Why waste rare IT expertise to solve problems, when it could be used to create new solutions”'
Continue reading to get an in-depth insight into all the benefits of an iPaaS, or discover the ‘Top 10 Integration Solutions’.
2. Get faster time to market
Create seamless integrations for business automation
When choosing an integration Platform as a Service, all the hard work of developing the technical aspects for creating and managing integrations comes ready to use via the user interface and dashboard. All that is left for you to do now is create an account, configure the integrations via the interface - as per your business needs - and start experiencing accelerated connections.
“Digital IT is about speed, agility and flexibility.” Pearl Zhu
By allowing you to rapidly deploy integrations with cloud applications and software to automate business processes such as Marketing, Invoicing, Customer Support, Inventory Management, Warehouse Management and much more, an iPaaS helps ensure a significantly faster time to market. Let’s suppose you’re looking to automate or improve different business processes, an iPaaS allows you to quickly and flexible connect new applications or SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to your software integrations, without any loss of data integrity.
By providing automated monitoring and logging features, an iPaaS helps quickly detect and resolve integration errors or API conflicts, preventing any integration roadblocks.
3. Get full data accessibility
Centralize all your integrations and data on one platform
Data is king… Data is the new gold… Data is the future. But how do we manage data? Being in control of your data & being able to handle becomes increasingly difficult the more that your business grows. One of the benefits of an iPaaS is that it helps give you the ability to view, access and share your data seamlessly across all your connected systems.
“Without data, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway”. Geoffrey Moore.
Centralizing all your software and system integrations on one platform, the iPaaS gives you complete control of your data without you having to depend on several partners or plugins created by several solution providers.
When using an iPaaS, whenever something changes in one connected application, the changes are updated in the other related applications, allowing for optimized data accessibility and insight. As a result, all connections can be accessed, monitored, created, and adjusted via just one dashboard without switching between various platforms and services.
Want to learn more about getting full ownership over your integrations and data? Discover how an iPaaS helps you ‘Be in control of your data and integrations’.
4. Improved data security
Automate integration error detection and simplify troubleshooting
One of the key benefits of an iPaaS is that it helps you improve your IT security. It does so by helping you avoid integrating your software or systems with several integration solutions or even worse - by ‘custom code’ solutions. By enabling you to organize all your integrated systems and software on a central platform, an iPaaS significantly simplifies the management of your data security. This means that only one integration solution (instead of several) needs to be upgraded to the latest security standards. Therefore, an iPaaS is preferred over custom code because an iPaaS gets upgraded to modern security standards by its supplier, while customized code solutions have to be maintained, upgraded, or updated manually.
'There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be - Robert Mueller, FBI Director 2012
The question isn’t ‘IF’, but rather when and how you will be in trouble concerning data security issues. In order to deal with this, it is essential to make sure your IT landscape and especially your integrations are monitored and can detect data security issues.
The automated Monitoring and Logging system of an iPaaS helps you instantly detect (and resolve) integration errors, API conflicts, and roadblocks. From logging all the operations of connected systems, detecting logging errors occurring, to logging critical operations or anomalies, an iPaaS helps keep you one step ahead of any integration problems or security issues that occur.
Read more about ensuring business continuity and preventing system crashes by enabling IT infrastructural insurance with the iPaaS →
5. Unlock data silos and access data insights
Enable seamless data sharing across integrations with centralization and normalization
Contrary to the quote above, several industry stats state that since 2018 the average modern organization implements more than 100 SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions. Each department will use several systems; for example, the sales team might use a CRM, ERP, or marketing automation system, but perhaps the marketing team doesn’t have access to these applications, which will make it challenging to share standard information that they could use to develop complementary marketing campaigns.
“The average company uses 80 different software applications. Unfortunately, it’s easy for these to become data silos without an integration plan and solution.”
These IT data silos become roadblocks to business growth, new revenue, digitization of business processes and prevent business opportunities to score on digital success. To eliminate data silos, an organization will need an integration strategy and IT solution to connect all systems. An iPaaS centralizes and normalizes data across all your connected systems and integrated SaaS solutions on one dashboard, making it easy for you to access data holistically, enabling seamless data sharing and preventing data silos from forming.
It is important to integrate all these software solutions on one platform, which provides centralized and simplified access to them to all departments of a business. As mentioned earlier, the traditional way of integrating these software solutions involves making point-to-point connections with custom-code or third-party solutions. This prevents data from being accessible across integrations and forms data silos.
These IT data silos become roadblocks to business growth, new revenue, digitization of business processes and prevent business opportunities to score on digital success. To eliminate data silos, an organization will need an integration strategy and IT solution to connect all systems. An iPaaS centralizes and normalizes data across all your connected systems and integrated SaaS solutions on one dashboard, making it easy for you to access data holistically, enabling seamless data sharing and preventing data silos from forming.
This increases business efficiency and transparency between the related software and presents more precise insights into your integrations, allowing you to plan tweaks, improvements and even newer connections that could help boost digital growth.
6. Ensure business scalability
Expand or modify your integrations seamlessly
“The biggest mistake a small business can make is to think like a small business. Therefore, it is important that your IT allows you to grow, as IT can be a real roadblock for business growth.“
The API-led approach of an iPaaS gives users a swiftly responding user interface and integration tools to map, transform and modify integrations as per preference. This enables an iPaaS to manage vast amounts of data and quickly scale as per business growth or as per a surge in orders during seasonal sale peaks.
Based on the powerful and trusted Symfony framework, an iPaaS offers a scalable core that enables users to tackle edge cases and create their custom configurations or add-ons using PHP and Symfony framework.
The iPaaS is additionally scalable, meaning that if more integrations are needed, they can be created quickly and self-sufficiently, without any loss of data integrity. Want to connect your ERP system to an e-commerce platform but then want to expand your IT landscape by adding integrations with PIM, CRM or e(POS) systems? An iPaaS enables you to do so without any complex coding or loss of data integrity, by simply allowing you to configure these connections via its user-friendly interface. Offering dedicated cloud space for your integrations, an iPaaS can scale up to accommodate as many connections as you need, making it a flexible and future-proof integration solution.
An iPaaS helps you to be scalable to:
- Automate your business processes
- Deal with significant amounts of orders
- Integrate your IT systems rapidly, by yourself
- Connect your relations, suppliers, and customers digitally, via EDI, JSON, XML
- Maintain IT security and compliance
7. Ensure error detection and business continuity
Enable monitoring, data caching, and integration reactivation contingencies
Another key benefit of an iPaaS is that it helps reduce the impact of integration hiccups or API conflicts. Notifying you of any integration errors or API conflicts, via a robust logging and monitoring system, an iPaaS helps prevent a big part of the negative business impact that faulty integrations cause.
“Integration errors are bound to happen since APIs of software sometimes just fail, or do not give a response, or just because the data quality and compatibility of API messages are not 100%.”
Solve problems quicker with an iPaaS
A great feature that iPaaS systems offer is that you can add ‘business rules’ to problems that have occurred to prevent them from happening again. By doing this, you can automatically avoid solving the same problems again.
The user-friendly, low-code interface of an iPaaS offers a ‘Support and Monitor’ cockpit that professionals can easily use without coding skills. This user interface displays integration errors and allows users to resolve them via the dashboard, saving the valuable time of your highly skilled IT employees from manual integration maintenance.
Ensure business continuity and IT infrastructural insurance with an iPaaS
Some iPaaS systems provide advanced technical security features and protect your integrations from inefficient data flows or system crashes from a surge of massive orders, by offering caching (temporarily saving) capabilities. An iPaaS allows you to transfer data from digital software and backup software to a cached data layer. This ensures business continuity in your IT infrastructure while troubleshooting systems that are down. An iPaaS also offers automatic reactivation procedures to restart the data flows after an integration error or system crash.
Here are a few instances during which an iPaaS prevents your IT from bringing your business to a standstill:
- Handling massive orders
- Dealing with IT eco-system crashes
- Preparing fail-safes in case your IT systems get hacked
- Centralization, notification, and logging for better IT-Security
These functions are just a few ways an iPaaS offers great infrastructural insurance for your IT landscape.
8. An iPaaS reduces costs and increases ROI
Create quick and cost-effective integrations with minimal IT support
Since the iPaaS is subscription-based and operates via a cloud framework, organizing costly on-premise hardware requiring ongoing manual maintenance can be avoided. Furthermore, by making it easy for junior developers, data experts, or business users to create and manage integrations via a user-friendly interface, an iPaaS helps save a significant amount of time and money on outsourcing or hiring highly skilled developers. What’s more, it allows you to optimize your senior developers on other complex projects that still require the full extent of their expertise.
Helping you detect and resolve integration errors by automatically monitoring and logging your connections, an iPaaS helps save significant maintenance and troubleshooting costs. By centralizing all your connections on one platform, the iPaaS provides seamless data sharing between all connected systems that help prevent data silos and provides holistic customer insights. Above all, by automating your business processes via the multiple software or cloud applications that it enables you to connect with, an iPaaS helps you avoid spending resources on repetitive manual tasks that are prone to human error.
Conclusion
To summarize, the key benefits of an iPaaS are:
- Lowered technical threshold
- Faster time to market
- Complete ownership and control over own data and integrations
- Unlock data silos and enable data insights
- Easy data security
- Scalable business processes and integrations
- Reduce the cost of troubleshooting, and inefficient data flows
- Saving cost of operations and increasing ROI.
- Reducing the time spent on unnecessary tasks, custom coding etc.
