Challenges of Systems Integration and How to Overcome Them

Today, organizations consist of a diverse set of applications and systems to manage their day-to-day operations. However, a lack of synchronization between these systems can make it difficult for enterprises to gain insight into performance, business trends, or opportunities. Thus, having a centralized network can be helpful for organizations to achieve their digital goals, and this is where Systems Integration comes to the rescue.

Systems Integration integrates all your business functions, including hardware, software, applications, and communications, providing a single place to communicate and interact with internal and external partners. According to a recent study, the global system integration (SI) market is likely to hit $530 billion by 2025, signifying a boom of more than double in just ten years.

Building the right integration strategy allows you to maintain an uninterrupted data flow between different systems. However, it becomes a considerable challenge to implement systems integration in your business. Below are the five common challenges with systems integration:

Monolithic Systems

It is often not possible to get rid of monolithic systems that are mostly legacy systems and cannot be replaced for the sake of integration. Due to such systems, integration becomes a challenge. A systems integrator needs to identify and choose the best way of integrating with monolithic systems within the enterprise.

Use of Different Systems

Each business unit may use different systems or applications as their operational responsibilities are not the same. But, a standard data model is required within the enterprise in order to integrate these systems. A systems integrator not only needs to satisfy the business requirements but also think about designing an integration architecture that has a standardized view of data within the enterprise.

Meeting the Requirements

When it comes to delivery, IT faces difficulty in ensuring quality due to constraints like time and cost. Although there are several tools available in the market that can speed up the project implementation, they often lack a good development pipeline and best architectural principles. A system integrator must ensure that the integration solution designed not only meets the functional requirements of today, but also future non-functional requirements such as performance, scalability, re-usability and maintenance.

Tool that Supports Hybrid Integration

Choosing the right tool that provides the best integration experience is a challenge for an enterprise. In modern connectivity, an integration tool must support hybrid integration, as enterprises may not want to go completely on cloud due factors such as legacy systems, regulatory compliance issues, and concerns around security and privacy. Hybrid integration tools address these gaps and help businesses leverage new applications on top of their existing systems.

Choosing the Right Products

Usually, an enterprise chooses a stack of products from a particular vendor and later identifies that the stack is either very complex to maintain or does not satisfy their needs. So, choosing the right set of products for your business is very important. The chosen product should allow integration with other systems or products so that it helps enterprises avoid another monolith and design and implement integration solutions for their current or future products.

Transform your Organization into a Connected Enterprise

As organizations modernize their IT infrastructures and integrate new technologies with the old ones, maintaining the data flows becomes increasingly difficult. IT systems integration across disparate technologies and applications enables automation, control, and visibility required to strengthen your relationship with partners and customers.