Get ready for your Digital Integration Hub

Integration technology has never been easy. Be it the traditional Message Queue, the Enterprise Service Bus, ETL tooling, Master Data Management and even Single Sign-On, everything tends to get complicated when you practice it at the enterprise level. In a typical IT organization, different tools are being managed in different teams, such as the BI competence center and the Integration competence center.

For a couple of years now, Gartner Group has been advocating to adopt a more holistic approach, which they named “Hybrid Integration Platform”. A platform as a collection of different technologies, but also as a unit of management and governance processes.

Getting Agile

With modern integration tools and technologies, it is no longer a necessity to organize the integration development effort in dedicated teams. Moreover, this would not resonate with the agile way of working most organizations have adopted. Gone are the competence centers.

Hence, when we consider the management of the integration platform, there is no single organizational entity left to make responsible. And given the increasing complexity of the Hybrid Integration Platform itself, this is not a small endeavor. You have to invest in knowledge of the integration market, select and procure products, integrate the toolset, develop monitoring and analytics, implement change and release management processes, set up governance practices and secure the whole.

Nothing to sniff at.

Going digital

With the ongoing digitization of businesses of all sorts, you also have to face an increasing scope of the platform. In good Gartner speak, you have to develop and manage a Digital Integration Hub on top of your Hybrid Integration Platform. Digital services are exposed as APIs to mobile devices, portals, social media, partners, supervisors and even embedded in larger service ecosystems.

With the digitization comes an enhanced business awareness. Suddenly, service levels translate into revenue. Self-healing systems, Auto Scaling services and Zero Downtime deployments become the norm. It is no longer sufficient to have a procedure in place to report a data breach to the authorities, you have to do the utmost to prevent them, continually updating all your systems to fix known vulnerabilities, and continuously monitoring for intrusion attempts so you can counter them in an early stage.

A major responsibility.

Talent drain

At the same time, in many organizations at least, the management of systems, servers and networks is getting cloud sourced. With Software-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and Platform-as-a-Service models widely on offer, running your software in your own datacenter makes less and less sense. Consequently, your colleagues experienced at running systems, people with the knowledge how to operate a platform securely, those who can define proper needs in a tender and assess the subsequent proposals, they are mostly tasked with new responsibilities or gone altogether. As a result, it can be painfully difficult to find a safe harbor for the integration toolset being orphaned in the agile, though being crucial for the digital.

The cloud has no mercy.

Demanding developers

Additionally, you have to consider staying ahead of your developers. After all, you don’t want to risk inheriting a hodgepodge of different tools to integrate, secure and manage from the autonomous development teams. That’s not the kind of integration platform to safely and reliably build your Digital Integration Hub upon. So, when the DevOps teams start using streaming integration, for instance, you have to provide them with a solution that works. Upfront. The same goes for GraphQL and for serverless functions. And who knows what the next five years will bring.

And once you have the functionality in place, you can expect being faced with CI/CD requirements. Creating an effective pipeline measuring test coverage, code quality and security is difficult enough for just one target product. For a Hybrid Integration Platform, it is much more challenging. And now, with the Digital Integration Hub, you have to take the deployment of security policies, network policies, API definitions, API policies, token generation, permission management, and pattern detection into consideration as well. And since APIs tend to have multiple concurrent versions active, simply keeping an overview is getting harder and harder.

It’s fair to conclude that only fairly large IT shops have the scope to arrange for their own Digital Integration Hub.

Get Ready

Remember Connext by Yenlo? Connext is designed to provide you with a Digital Integration Hub, but without the need to Select, Integrate, Secure, Operate, Manage, and Maintain all its components. It has everything you need, There’s an API Gateway, API Management, Identity and Permission Management, Key Management, Traffic Management, API Auditing and Scanning, API Firewall, Message Broker, Service Bus, Data Integration, Business Rules, Business Process Management, Complex Event Processing, Monitoring and Analytics, CI/CD, and more. It uses the renowned AWS cloud, running on top of its core services, ensuring security, reliability, and availability. It is extensible, so you can add your own microservices, if you want. We keep the platform components up to date, both technically and functionally. That’s right. We promise to keep adding components your developers want to use. Because integration is our business. And because we believe smart integration architecture should not be constrained by available technology. 

The Cloud takes away, and the Cloud gives back.

A Data Integration Hub explained

Surely, you can rely on Yenlo if you need help migrating your current integrations to Connext, developing new ones, or even discuss your integration strategy. We can train and coach your developers. We analyze your log files, looking for issues and recommending improvements. We can even assure the quality of your deployments.

You just add your governance.

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