Are you looking for an efficient way to integrate disparate cloud systems to synchronize various applications and share data in real-time? If yes, then you need to adopt cloud data integration into your system!
Cloud data integration is the practice of integrating data used by diverse systems, within public or private clouds, where at least one endpoint is a cloud source such as Azure SQL, Google Cloud SQL, Amazon RDS, etc. Cloud data integration involves the use of a system of tools and software that helps connect various applications, data repositories, and workplace environments to enable data-sharing in real time.
Learnings from Dresner Advisory Associates’ 2020 Data Pipelines Market Study show that over 80% of enterprise Business Operations leaders say data integration is critical to ongoing operations. The same study states that 67% of enterprises are relying on data integration to support analytics today and over 12% plan to get on board within the next 12 months. These numbers and figures just highlight the importance that enterprises are now placing on data integration and how crucial it is to analytics and BI initiatives. This article takes a closer look at the varied benefits that come along with cloud data integration and the challenges that stop it from being fully adopted.
The Benefits
A Gartner survey recently revealed that 81% of public cloud users leverage more than one cloud provider and that there is now an immediate need to properly integrate the various cloud systems. Cloud data integration can help in this and efficiently synchronize applications and share data across disparate cloud systems. Here are a few of the other benefits that cloud data integration offers
- Data Compliance: It is a well-known fact that companies need to store and maintain customer data in compliance with standards such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS. This will help ensure the security of sensitive data. Integrating a data pool into your systems through cloud data integration facilitates the establishment of workflows, ensuring your business can maintain compliance with these standards in a centralized manner. This integration provides a comprehensive approach to data compliance, ensuring sensitive information is handled following industry regulations.
- Synchronizing Data in Real-Time: Businesses often use various systems for different applications and different teams and one of the major issues that companies face when doing this is the existence of a massive amount of duplicate data on various systems due to a lack of proper updates. Cloud data integration, enhanced by continuous control monitoring, can help solve this issue with real-time data updates on all systems, ensuring that there is no error in analysis due to inconsistencies in data.
- Saves Time and Effort: A major obstacle faced by businesses is that of manual data entry, which is extremely error-prone and time-consuming. Automating data integration to the cloud streamlines and accelerates the process and gives businesses the freedom to allocate their valuable resources elsewhere.
- Data Modernization: Companies that have long since been using legacy systems to store years of accumulated data might find it difficult to shift to modern cloud systems due to the sheer volume of data that needs to be transformed and migrated. The incorporation of big data integration solutions, particularly through cloud data integration, offers a resolution to this challenge. This approach provides a seamless data integration solution, ensuring synchronization between cloud data and mainframe or legacy systems of record with minimal resource utilization. Consequently, this approach facilitates the smooth movement, synchronization, and replication of data between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud.
The Challenges
A recent survey by IDG stated that enterprise data volumes are increasing by 63% on average, with 90% of the surveyed companies using cloud data warehouses for data storage. A new need to consolidate and transform cloud data has risen, a challenge that cloud data integration can help solve. But creating a process to easily access data and to ensure that no applications fail requires massive computing power and storage to be readily available in the cloud, a requirement that comes with a set of challenges such as
- ETL: Traditional data integration projects saw the use of complex ETL (extract transform load) workflows that helped clean data and transform it into the format needed by the target system. But this is a massive task, one that is proportional to the volume and veracity of business data, and one for which writing code is no easy task. Cloud data integration can help mitigate this to a certain extent, but serious thought must be given to how ETL can be performed without slowing down the integration or adding a lot of complexity. Incorporating cloud security monitoring is critical to safeguard data integrity during these processes.
- Data Movement: Moving data between clouds and between clouds and on-site systems can be a time-consuming task that is so greatly error-prone. To ensure a smooth transfer of data from one source to another, strong comprehensive strategies must be placed that will help reduce errors while also meeting the required transfer frequency. Cloud data integration will not work without the existence of such solid strategies.
- Lack of Standardization: A major challenge to cloud data integration is the lack of a standard protocol when it comes to integrating data between cloud systems as well as cloud and on-site systems. Each cloud service tends to have its own set of formats and schemes. To mitigate this problem, data connectors need to be constantly updated to ensure proper integration each time a new cloud service is introduced.
Why Choose Intone for your Cloud Data Integration?
Cloud data integration can help your business get a cohesive IT infrastructure that streamlines data flow. Intone is a proud provider of state-of-the-art cloud data integration solutions to various industry leaders and pioneers. We offer
- A data integration strategy that works across multiple platforms and with it comes a variety of data sources that perform processing of critical data in real time.
- Tracking devices with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors that perform various functions such as enhancing operational efficiency, reducing risk, and yielding new insights and analytics.
- Intone’s Stack Aero provides a full-stack platform to model, deploy, run, and manage applications running in the private or public cloud with a common taxonomy that can help adopt any computer platform and operate consistently across any environment powered by API, Mobile, and ChatOps.
- Intone’s solutions offer improved operational efficiency, increased flexibility, and scalability, reduced operational costs, and increased revenue.
- Integrating our solutions can help you achieve Faster time-to-market along with better internal communications.
Check out how Intone can help you streamline your manual business process with Robotic Process Automation solutions.