INTEGRATION ON CLOUD - A STUDY IN KRONOS
Introduction
Cloud is the buzz word in the enterprise
application landscape today. From human resources (HR) to payroll, customer relationship
management to workforce management, and analytics to intelligence, every domain
is either moving or aspires to move towards cloud delivery models. Apart from
the minimum turnaround times, ability to scale
up or down instantly and low Capex, there are a plethora of
benefits an organization's IT reaps with cloud adoption. That said, it is not
devoid of challenges, some of which are:
Ø
How secure is the data when stored on the cloud?
What are the risks?
Ø
How difficult is it to choose the right cloud
service provider?
Ø
What are the various data privacy considerations?
Ø
How
difficult is it to integrate legacy on-premise applications and possibly, other
future cloud applications with each other?
At the moment, I want to take you
through the integration challenges we face with cloud adoption. For the first
part of this blog, let us just see the available Integration options to
interface cloud with on premise applications. We will dig deeper as we move
through the other 2 parts of this series.
Integration options for cloud
Here, I am listing some of the various
available options for integrating an on-premise application with a SaaS
application.
Vendor proprietary tools
Many ERP vendors have integration
tools tailored to their packages for ease of integration with external systems.
For example, Kronos Workforce Integration Manager, Peoplesoft Component
Interface, and SAP NetWeaver - all these tools allow data transfer between
their respective systems and other on-premise / cloud applications, without directly
hitting the core database tables.
Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS)
Integration platforms themselves
come as a service delivered on the cloud. Multiple variants of integration models
such as cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-on-premise, or B2B are possible through IPaaS.
IPaaS is ideal where there is a need to connect various clouds or on-premise
applications together with a medium to low complexity as it provides a wide
range of connectivity, robust application program interface (API) framework,
security and data management techniques. However, IPaaS is still evolving. Hence,
connecting highly complex legacy systems to cloud using IPaaS is not a proven credible
approach yet, especially, for a large enterprise. Some commercially available
IPaaS providers are Informatica, Dell Boomi, and TIBCO (along with their
traditional integration framework).
Third-party integration tools
Just like IPaaS, there are various
third-party commercially available Middleware, which can help connect on-premise
applications with the one on the cloud. IBM Websphere MQ and Webmethods are two
examples.
Note: The major differences between third-party integration tools on-premise
and IPaaS lie in the way it is procured, used and governed. In IPaaS, the licenses
are usually not procured, but subscribed to. The customer does not install or
manage the required hardware or middleware. They own the development and the
deployment, but not the product license.
API and Web services
APIs or Web services are a common
means of interfacing real-time data and to a certain extent, batch data, between
cloud and on-premise systems. Let's take Kronos as an example. From purely a service-oriented
architecture (SOA) perspective, Kronos provides an extensive set of XML APIs
for data exchange. In SOA terms, information exchanges between Kronos and external
systems are made possible by combining Extensible markup Language (XML) APIs
with any high level language such as Javascript, Perl, Visual Basic or C++.
Let us talk in more detail about
the Integration considerations and a get a quick glimpse of guideline in
choosing the best integration architecture, in coming parts. Until then, stay
hungry!
*****End of Part-1*****
Link to part 2: http://www.infosysblogs.com/oracle/2017/03/integration_on_cloud_-_a_study.html
Link to part 3: http://www.infosysblogs.com/oracle/2017/04/integration_on_cloud_-_a_krono.html
Comments
valuable information in this blog in oracle training and to clarify the doubts in oracle thank for sharing the blog
Posted by: vikram | February 15, 2017 11:09 AM
Thanks for Sharing, looking forward to the next 2 parts
Posted by: Divya Tewari | March 7, 2017 8:05 AM