10 Considerations Before Choosing Your iPaaS Solution

For any business which involves IT or even non-IT, one of the most important components is data. Data is the driving force for decision making. Decision makers make decisions based on reports which the data, being created through processes, represents. As because data is so important, databases or storages are having a lot of importance in the software industry. Few of the major businesses on IT software produces databases to ensure quick retrieval of persistent data when required. Businesses, on the other hand, uses the IT industry to make sure their business runs efficiently through a set of software. Some of these softwares are tailor-made particularly for one business while others are specifically dealing with a particular set of business.

Even if you are using a software product, or services, one of the major concern for any software vendor is how data created in one environment flows to another. Integration platform ensures the data flow executes perfectly, on time and also following the business rule specific to a particular business. A new set of the industry has been evolved to ensure that software can efficiently talk to each other without human intervention. A large number of software vendors are also leveraging the industry to connect two or more applications.

iPaaS as an Industry

As a common problem for every software is to ensure connectivity, a major set of software vendor taken this industry to a new level. A set of software product evolved over time, which addresses these issues and takes care of integration between two or more application. With the advent of the cloud industry, a lot of software vendors are providing solutions to these problems.

iSaaS:

Software tools which are simple and does not support any change require an integration platform which is more or less plug and play. The software which is always pre-packaged by the software vendor for usage is Integration software as a service. Examples: Zapier, Microsoft Flow, Tray.io, oplim etc.

iPaaS:

iPaaS, on the other hand, is oriented towards more complex software programs where a large number of integration customizations are required. A large number of vendors in the iPaaS segment are constantly building software or services which can help the developers or end users to simplify the task of building complex integration problems.

Some of the prominent iPaaS software players are Infromatica, Mulesoft, APPSeCONNECT, Dell Boomi etc. In this blog, we will understand what are the things that you must keep in mind while choosing your integration solution.

Rule 1: Your Software Platform Should not be Rigid While Delivering a Solution-

As a business analyst or business decision maker, if you are dealing with complex software, you must understand, that your business needs more and more adjustments over time, so software that you are choosing should have the functionality to incorporate the changes.

For example, let’s say, you are running an eCommerce Store, and you keep the customer information to a separate database which another software uses to send occasional newsletters. Now to be compliant with GDPR, your company has undergone certain changes and because of privacy, your security auditor asks you not to save the customer info to a separate database. But as you already have an integration platform in place, you don’t have a clue on how to stop this action. Do you want to hire a developer to remove the integration? Does your integration solution at all cater the problem we have talked about? Does your software always need a developer for maintenance? Does your software require a developer to remove simple integrations? These are the common question you must ask yourself while choosing the integration platform.

In the case of APPSeCONNECT, we made sure every integration you make is developed independently before it is taken part in complex business data flows. These ensure that data flow between one application to another is individually identifiable and you can turn on or off any business data flow without hampering any other, this is in contrast with other integration platforms where all integration points are inseparable and cannot be decoupled easily.

Rule 2: Do you Know Whether the Software Handles Exceptions Correctly or Not?

As integration software always deals with large volumes of data, it is important to note that you must see how the exceptions are handled in the software. Some software tries to cleanse the data automatically, but it is not always possible to execute a continuous stream of transactions without failures. As an integration platform, there should be an easier mechanism which keeps track to all the transactions being performed, logs it somewhere and can retry them at a later point of time, or even notifies the IT Systems department for manual data cleansing.

APPSeCONNECT provides an inbuilt mechanism of data error handling without requiring any input from the implementation. Thus if implementation consultant misses out on the implementation of exception strategies, the platform covers it for you.

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