Amid global sustainability and pandemic uncertainties, knee-jerk geopolitical tensions and various digitalization pressures, gaining digital resilience will be critical for survival.

Building a resilient enterprise is no simple task. According to IDC, the key to success in a post-pandemic world is to gain digital resilience, but traditional approaches add to IT complexity and struggle to break down data silos.

For something this important, there is little room for failure in terms of integrating on-premises and cloud applications, as well as data sources and devices. Yet, for senior executives in the region, cutting through the complexity to establish a single, reliable source of truth across teams, functions, and applications quickly remains a consistent pain point. 

A common challenge is ensuring that electronic data interchange (EDI) environments are integrated seamlessly and can be scaled. This is because legacy EDI systems were not built to integrate with new cloud-based applications or support projects for mobile apps and API connections.

The result of the challenge is a system that is hard to fix, does not allow visibility across the supply chain, and slows partner onboarding. To adapt to future business disruptions, digital resilience is a central tenet of future enterprises that, according to IDC, “must be underpinned by an open, integrated, and holistic technology architecture.” 

Digital resilience in the pandemic era

The mission for firms in the region now is to deliver unparalleled quality products and applications for the business and their customers, forge a reliable and sustainable supply chain and improve financial results.

In this regard, synchronization of data and cohesive operations are crucial, and organizations must scrutinize their ability to do so, as they look to lay the foundations for their businesses in the digital future to come.

Furthermore, with global economic headwinds impacting supply chains and economic stability, enterprises will require even more data accuracy, process agility and product innovation than ever before.

Amid these increasingly complex disruptions, businesses can consider leveraging cloud-native digital integration platforms to respond to market volatility with a simplified IT strategy that delivers agility, resilience, and innovation.

Introducing iPaaS

As businesses and organizations look to systems and processes that enable them to rapidly respond to changing conditions, digital investment that improves data accuracy will directly lead to unlocking new business efficiencies that will reap historic benefits and new business opportunities.

While bespoke code, enterprise service bus (ESB) and application programming interfaces (APIs) are conventional methods for integrating applications and data, they are not without their problems.

Even with developer-friendly APIs, issues can be “lost in translation” when bad data enters the environment, undermining integration. That means, if you expose a good API to a bad process or bad data in the back end, you have essentially compromised the business and its assets. Expected outcomes will not be met, as a result of poor data integration and flow of data within the organization.

This is where integration-platform-as-a-service solutions (iPaaS) differ from the monolithic platforms running from an ESB, on-premises, or infrastructures that are heavily developer-focused. Cloud-native in nature, iPaaS resolves data integration and integrity issues by operating like ready-made, reusable strips of Velcro. Also:

  • The connections between legacy and cloud applications in iPaaS are portable and highly reusable, which makes it easy to deploy and maintain for IT professionals of all experience levels. 
  • Instead of needing to solve integration issues in-house, iPaaS provides far more functionality, takes less time to implement, and gives employees time to devote to business-critical responsibilities.
  • Leveraging the power of the cloud to eliminate massive capital costs, iPaaS solutions connect apps and data with speed and ease, enabling businesses to break down data silos by integrating on-premises and cloud applications, data sources and devices across their distributed environment. As a result, enterprises ensure they can operate more efficiently and enable all customers to automatically benefit from the latest features and functionalities. Employees gain a singular view of the data across business units and functions, eliminating issues with bad data.
  • Maintenance is simplified because iPaaS can make updates or conduct re-platforming or refining existing systems, in the background. Also, it allows system integrators to complete more projects, get involved with more business functions, or company subsidiaries, and generate a lot more value for the enterprise through a more seamless engagement.
  • Easily installed and managed, iPaaS facilitates data governance management to empower organizations investing in big data technologies to safely expand the end-user base, provide more value, and can improve the ROI of data-driven initiatives.

Furthermore, iPaaS overcomes the expertise barrier that hinders regional organizations from consolidating enterprise class data into data lakes. With easy deployment to new or existing big data clusters, iPaaS reduces the number of IT requests and gives teams more time to spend on innovation.

At the same time, business analysts will be in a better position to harness data-driven business use cases and add more value to the underlying operations.