What is a cloud integration platform?
Today, one of the biggest challenges in leveraging data across on-premises and multiple clouds is maintaining common control as well as sharing or integrating massive data across these disparate environments. A cloud integration platform integrates and synchronizes your data across hybrid, multi-cloud environments. It allows fast, easy deployment of integration-runtime on your chosen cloud environments by locating the integration close to your data, thus significantly lowering data latencies and cost by minimizing the need to move data in and out of cloud environments.
A cloud integration platform provides low-code, no-code design interfaces, breadth of connectivity, support for multiple integration styles, and pre-built templates for easy, rapid integration. It also provides common operations management of integration workloads to ensure operational effectiveness. Cloud integration platforms seamlessly integrate data quality, enforce policies and rules, and activate metadata to automate data integration. A cloud integration platform meets the needs of both IT-driven and self-service integration, resulting in faster time to market.
What are the business drivers for a cloud integration platform?
Since the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have witnessed an acceleration in digital transformation born out of necessity, epitomized by online ordering and delivery of restaurant meals, groceries, and every kind of merchandise. Examples of the pandemic driving transformation are innumerable.
As communities worldwide gradually recover from the impact of Covid, this rapid pace of digital transformation continues, with organizations scrambling to prevent the loss of customers, opportunities, and revenue.
A key consideration in digital transformation is how enterprises leverage data to make decisions. Data-driven decision making is quickly becoming widespread throughout organizations. Market conditions are fueling this conspicuous momentum in data-driven decision making.
To remain competitive, companies are aspiring to effectively leverage data to enhance customer experience, improve efficiency and effectiveness, and generate new revenue streams. This requires both situational awareness and predictive insights. Organizations need to understand what is going on right now as well as what might happen in the future.
To accomplish this, business needs integrated views of their data across hybrid, multi-cloud data silos. To this end, organizations are investing in a cloud integration platform to quickly meet these demands.
A cloud integration platform increases effectiveness to respond and innovate faster
Cloud strategy is playing a significant role in data-driven transformation. Companies are moving data and application workloads to the cloud to respond faster to evolving, dynamic business needs. And they are not always moving these workloads to just the one cloud platform – but rather to multiple cloud platforms.
Regardless of the incentive driving cloud modernization – a department’s business goals, a desire to prevent vendor lock-in, the need to select the right cloud provider for the right workload, a cloud-first strategy for new data and applications – hybrid, multi-cloud is the new reality.
New set of complexities in the hybrid, multi-cloud world
A new set of complexities is challenging organizations in their quest to deliver faster insights for business decisions. These include data proliferation, new data formats, diverse infrastructures, egress costs, new levels of security and privacy considerations, and the process of stitching data together across on-premises and/or across multiple clouds.
Of course, data integration and data management lie at the heart of this complexity. Data integration is critical for capturing business moments by extracting, ingesting, transforming, cleansing, enriching, preparing, orchestrating, and delivering trusted, relevant data to a wide variety of data consumers.
However, data integration must be reimagined and adapted to work in a hybrid, multi-cloud data landscape.
A cloud integration platform is essential for organizations to overcome emerging complexities in the hybrid, multi-cloud environments to scale analytics and deliver insights faster, thereby driving growth and sustaining competitive advantage.
Cloud integration platform benefits
In today’s hybrid, multi-cloud world, you need a cloud integration platform like the Intelligent Data Management Cloud, which is:
Comprehensive: Manage all your data – any type, pattern, complexity, or workload across any location – with one cloud integration platform
Simple: Empower all your data practitioners with a low-code, no-code experience
Intelligent: Automate thousands of manual tasks and augment human activity, thanks to AI-powered insights and recommendations
High-performing: Effortlessly scale all enterprise workloads with elastic and serverless processing
Also, it is imperative that your cloud integration platform seamlessly integrates critical data management functions like data quality, policy enforcement, DataOps, and metadata activation to ensure delivery of connected, trusted, and contextual data to your business community.
Informatica’s cloud integration platform is at the forefront of abstracting and overcoming the complexity of the multi-hybrid, multi-cloud data landscape, enabling you to focus on delivering business objectives rather than managing the data.
Let’s take a look at some of the key benefits of Informatica’s intelligent, automated cloud integration platform:
Promotes simplicity and flexible choices: Delivers breadth of connectivity with 3000+ connectors and supports diverse integration styles and flexible deployment options, including zero-overhead serverless deployment and data engineering to quickly deliver and orchestrate your data pipelines.
Controls cost overruns: Offers flexible, consumption-based pricing with IPUs, increased visibility and management of costs, and the ability to control compute and data transfer costs. Eliminates integration costs that you incur with multiple point solutions by seamlessly integrating data quality, data curation, data governance policy enforcements, active metadata, and more.
Removes resource and time constraints: Eliminates manual hand-coding and reduces the number of resources and time spent on integration by using low-code, no-code agile interfaces, pre-built templates, in-line data quality, and self-service data preparation.
Delivers massive scale and high performance: Powered by microservices and API-based modern architecture, the Informatica cloud integration platform delivers the scalability and performance that you need for extreme data volume and real-time requirements with mass ingestion, pushdown optimization, multi-tenancy, interoperability by design, and more.
Accelerates data integration with AI-powered, active metadata intelligence: Dramatically accelerates data integration workflows with an active, intelligent metadata foundation that provides insight into data characteristics, rules, and policies, and shortens the path to delivering data for AI with intelligent automation like next-best transformation, automatic application of data quality rules, and more.
Enables operational effectiveness and insights: Our DataOps capability, provided by the Informatica cloud integration platform, operationalizes and manages data and application integration workflows and data pipelines as well as enables continuous integration, delivery, and deployment, resulting in operational efficiency and effectiveness.
Cloud integration platform success stories
Banco ABC Brasil modernizes in the cloud to process credit applications 30% faster
Banco ABC Brasil offers deposit and commercial banking services in Brazil and Cayman Islands. ABC Brasil‘s objective was to improve their digital credit process and reduce risk by increasing data-driven decisions. To fulfill this data-driven ambition, the bank enabled a data lake in the cloud to process and analyze credit data more effectively.
By modernizing in the cloud with a cloud integration platform, ABC Brasil has significantly improved data self-service capabilities, scaled data analytics, reduced costs, and monetized its data assets.
Grant Thornton accelerates client service delivery, establishes digital workplace
Grant Thornton is one of the world’s leading independent audit, tax, and advisory firms. The company’s goal was to establish a single, streamlined client engagement management model to better measure the profitability of client engagements across its businesses. The company is transforming from traditional data center-based architecture to modern cloud solutions.
They chose the Informatica Cloud Integration Platform to integrate data from legacy, on-premises data sources as well as new cloud applications to deliver trusted data to client services managers. This enables them to quickly measure the profitability of each client engagement, allowing resources allocated to a project to be adjusted on the fly, if needed.
Get started with a cloud integration platform today
To realize the promise of cloud and to democratize data and AI in your organization, you need a cloud integration platform that is future-proofed from the perspective of investment and architecture, and that delivers the automation and scale required in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment.
To take the platform for a drive, get started with a free cloud trial.
