Cloud Integration for your Business
The appeal of the cloud is obvious: low and predictable costs, robust feature sets, rapid deployment, and no in-house IT support. No wonder more and more growing companies are putting their IT in the cloud. But what about connecting your Saas Application with your On Premise System. The potential for Integration is a key consideration when choosing an SaaS solution.
Integration: The Achilles’ Heel Of SaaS Many small and midsize businesses are now running some or all of their business using cloud computing applications. Yet, while quick adoption and low cost may be highlights of using SaaS applications, integration is not. The Achilles’ heel for SaaS historically has been integrating with the rest of the enterprise. The state of integration gives many potential SaaS adopters pause. Indeed, a recent Forrester Research survey of companies’ SaaS attitudes found integration was the most common concern for the 38% of businesses that said they had no plans to adopt SaaS applications. Furthermore, SaaS applications can’t just go hauling out data from inside your firewall. You prevent that never will anyone get through my firewall to my application to access my data. But at some point, many companies do want their SaaS applications to communicate with systems located inside the firewall. So, how do you solve that problem? You need integration technology.
Configuration, Not Coding How can SaaS integrators help? The success of Saas integration is to offer that businesses, especially small and midsize companies with scarce IT talent, don’t have to hand-code or directly customize middleware. That is why RapidiOnline offers a data integration framework, as well as preconfigured “solution packs” to integrate on-premises software such as MS Dynamics NAV as well as SaaS offerings, such as Salesforce.
Integration requires planning Just as the typical SaaS application requires a degree of set-up and customization before it can be used, integration tools also require planning. In particular, integration creates interdependencies, and that requires keeping the big picture in mind. You can’t just throw applications in there and expect to be able to integrate the data across all the systems. That means setting some ground rules is in order. The best approach is to try to only have the information on one system and use the integration to only display it on the other system, [and] don’t allow editing in other than the system of record.
April 10th, 2009
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