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