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For business enterprises undergoing a digital transformation, hybrid integration architecture is becoming an important consideration. According to a survey conducted by EMC, 88% of respondents believed that a sound hybrid integration platform is critical for them and other businesses who wish to achieve a successful digital transformation. These hybrid cloud technologies enable businesses to transform from being a helpless identity to a customer-centric enterprise - a key requirement of digital transformation. There are lots of skeptics who may ask - where do the digital transformation and hybrid integration actually intersect?. The answer is - they intersect at multiple levels. This post discusses the role played by Hybrid Integration Platforms (HIP) in detail.
How Can HIP Lead an Enterprise-wide Digital Transformation
A hybrid integration architecture aids in the following ways:
1. Supports the Evolution of New Business Models: Differentiated experiences is what most customers expect from a technology-driven enterprise. This is why businesses are investing in agile technology solutions, which help them build and test new business concepts without affecting the existing workflow. Experimentation is a key to success in a digitally-driven business landscape. At times, experimenting with your data center can be tedious in terms of resources, time, and money. This is where a hybrid integration architecture may help. A hybrid cloud platform will enable you to experiment with the new concepts as quickly as possible without the need for complicated infrastructure or resources. The only requirement is there should be a proper governance mechanism in place regarding compliance, security, and other reliability considerations.
2. Ensures Seamless Connectivity: A HIP is a technology-driven infrastructure that utilizes different control and communication protocols to integrate various systems in the cloud environment of an organization undergoing the enterprise-wide digital transformation. A business enterprise may use any of these types of applications:
- Mobile Applications: This may include third-party applications or customized applications that can be accessed from anywhere.
- SaaS Platforms: This may include leading platforms such as Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.
- Internet of Things (IoT): It may be employed for communicating with industrial equipment
- Social Media Networks: There are several social media networks that allow businesses to keep in touch with their customers such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
For effective digital transformation, it is important for businesses to ensure that these systems talk with each other, and perform as expected. This is where a sound HIP can help.
3. Helps Standardize Various Functioning Areas: There are businesses who use multiple-cloud environments and hybrid cloud for their daily operations. A multiple cloud environment, often abbreviated as multi-cloud, indicates that a business might be using multiple clouds such as AWS for development cloud and Sales CRM for marketing and sales cloud. These cloud environments have different functioning areas such as management, monitoring, administration, and security. However, a hybrid integration platform helps standardize these key functioning areas across all platforms while ensuring compliance with established protocols. It also ensures a better user experience for different roles involved in a hybrid integration project such as integration specialists, citizen integrators, administrators, etc.
4. Helps Transform Legacy Infrastructures: A hybrid integration platform combines various heterogeneous on-premise applications, including bare-metal and virtualization servers, private clouds, as well as containers. Also, it may encompass a wide variety of providers, as well as public clouds. This is an advantage for businesses that not only want to capitalize on fast and easy deployment options that a hybrid platform offers, but also the security of managing their solutions on premises. Most of the advanced hybrid integration platforms enable their clients to use private, public, and third-party applications efficiently while serving their customer requirements, as well as meet their business obligations, as well as SLAs.
5. Optimizes Business Functions: Hybrid cloud, along with multi-cloud is playing a key role in supporting the critical business functions adopted by businesses. Nowadays, the public cloud is being preferred by businesses for the distinct advantages that they offer such as disaster recovery, non-production, as well as long-term retention of data. All these distinct features directly lead to cost optimization of digital businesses. Hosted private cloud and private cloud is preferred for business applications that demand a certain level of discretion such as warehouses, or shop environments. However, hybrid cloud integration platforms are preferred by all those businesses that wish to capitalize on different digital transformation trends. These platforms allow businesses to augment their performance and serve customers better.
Indeed, a hybrid integration architecture helps any business to create a flexible, productive, and responsive environment, which easily connects systems with individuals, ecosystems, and other businesses. And this integration is performed with the sole goal of delivering differentiated experiences, and transformative business benefits.