Cloud Integration Solutions That Drive Modern Innovation

Modern digital environments are astonishingly complex. Distributed across multiple platforms, premises, and solutions, they demand a significant amount of buy-in from organizations aiming to create integrated modern systems. Cloud integration solutions make this distribution possible so that businesses are capable of achieving so much more with their platform

As tech companies have grown at pace over recent years it's become increasingly necessary for them to deploy a broader range of technologies to provide the custom software features and functionality necessary to succeed. To aid in this goal, cloud integration solutions are capable of combining multiple cloud-based and in-house software solutions into a single point of access for organizations.

By doing this well, cloud integration empowers technology startups and catalyzes digital transformations by offering seamless efficiency, broad flexibility, and the ability to scale as needed.

What is Cloud Integration?

Cloud integration engineers build solutions that combine multiple layers of application, data storage, and computation into a single system for businesses. When innovative cloud solutions are successfully implemented within an organization they are often transformational for teams.

By combining multiple solutions from platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP(Google Cloud Platform) amongst others cloud integrations break down data silos, enhance visibility, and streamline business processes. Yet, the number of ways there are to do this is almost as varied and diverse as the platforms and services there are to integrate with.

How to Achieve Effective Cloud Integration

Custom cloud software development is focused on creating innovative solutions built to the specific requirements of your business. These can include cloud-to-cloud integrations that blend multiple services into a single dashboard, but they're just as likely to include cloud-to-local integrations that put the power and capabilities of the cloud alongside on-premises services.

The most widely requested integration requests we receive enables data to be shared and synchronized between multiple data stores across on-premises systems and cloud storage solutions in real time. A cloud engineering team can create a solution that enables autonomous offsite backups or combines separate data sources into a single point of truth for organizations to work with.

Good application integrations can also allow multiple applications to share resources and commands to implement complex business processes quickly and efficiently. Some of our most popular use cases for application integrations come from companies looking to build quality supply chain integrations and relationship management systems — each capable of delivering significant advantages to their parent organization.

What Are the Benefits of Cloud Integration?

For companies that plan to lean on the capabilities of the cloud, it's worthwhile asking what successful cloud integration can deliver before deploying it. After all, cloud integration solutions deliver few new software packages of their own.

What cloud integration engineers do deliver, however, is the ability to combine multiple services and sources into a single endpoint for businesses — a transformation that can be truly revolutionary all on its own. So let's take a look at some of the biggest advantages that cloud solutions engineers deliver for businesses.

Enabling a Greater Degree of Flexibility and Scale

When using cloud integration to combine multiple services, applications, and sources you unlock the ability to scale as needed using all available cloud technologies. Once implemented, additional resource and capability can be called up to meet demand at just a moments notice.

Breaking Down Data Silos

Data is essential to a business's capabilities today. Having vast and distributed data sources available to access in real-time makes it possible to gather detailed insights into every area of the business as needed.

The enhanced visibility enabled by cloud integrations makes it possible to create remarkable data dashboards and maximize a team's overview.

Provides Centralised App Deployment

Deploying business-critical applications is time-consuming and obstructive in many organizations. The repetition required to troubleshoot problems on a case-by-case basis when installing applications manually can make things even more challenging.

Cloud platforms allow for cloud-to-ground app sharing and distribution amongst any number of clients — reducing the amount of work and time required by significant volumes.

Eliminate Data Loss

One of the biggest advantages of cloud integrations is the automations it enables within businesses. With innovative cloud solutions, teams can create automated data backups in real-time across multiple environments.

The ability to recover from a major outage with zero data loss and very little downtime is an invaluable asset worth a lot of investment across many industries.

Key Use Cases for Cloud Integration

Integration solutions can be a huge boost within any organization in and around tech today. We often see a pattern in the organizations and industries that frequently use cloud integrations to their fullest advantage. Some of these use cases include:

Manufacturing

Complete cloud integration creates an environment where real-time data gathering, analysis, and optimization are made possible. The combination of technologies and services this enables is well-suited for modern manufacturing by making it possible to implement:

• Predictive maintenance capabilities
• Active monitoring systems
• Productivity metrics enabled by data
• Autonomous quality control systems

Fintech

The capabilities of cloud solutions are ideally suited to the requirements of financial technology companies. Cloud integrations can readily deliver these capabilities without requiring a huge amount of early investment or buy-in to any one single ecosystem or environment.

Effective integrations allow analytics platforms, banking systems, and customer data to be seamlessly integrated across multiple environments. In practice, these capabilities enable features such as real-time fraud detection, reduced risk, enhanced security, and an improved customer experience in day-to-day use.

Healthtech

In the healthcare industry, effective cloud connections enable better data sharing and access than has ever been possible before. The potential for this Healthtech revolution is impossible to overstate. Being able to access electronic health records securely in an instant is already enabling better insight through health tech applications and integrations that are changing users' lives.

Using cloud integrations, providers have been able to implement real-time patient monitoring, remote consultations, personalized treatments, and better patient outcomes.

Energy and Utilities

Integrated cloud technologies enable organizations within the energy industry to do more for their users. Enabling upgrades for energy infrastructure and smart appliances, cloud integration engineers have provided businesses with the tools to shift from reactive to proactive models and take charge of how they deploy and use resources.

Challenges of Cloud Integration in Practice

The key to using cloud integrations effectively comes from putting the strategies and plans in place to overcome its biggest pitfalls. Our teams of cloud solutions engineers do this by first identifying the challenges that apply to the organization and then building solutions to mitigate those areas.

1. Lack of Standardisation

There's no single universal standard approach to integrating all the vast and varied cloud and in-house resources an organization might have available to them. For example, different applications, resources, and services often use different interfaces and data types. These variations make it a challenge to create and maintain all the necessary connections to interact between multiple cloud and local environments.

2. Keeping up to Date

Maintaining many varied applications all at once across multiple platforms and systems puts an increased demand on maintenance and security. Each application will need its own updates, upgrades, and patches to maintain a secure environment — requiring careful management and monitoring.

3. Managing Large Data Volumes and Rising Complexity

As you gain access to an ever-growing amount of data the challenges of management and maintenance become increasingly significant. Often, processing and using such large amounts of data can require hardware upgrades or additional computing resources and engineers to manage.

4. Data Security and Privacy

Securing and maintaining data in an inter-connected environment is far from trivial. To do this effectively you need a strong grasp on the security measures and tools applicable to cloud environments. Engineering teams routinely deploy quality encryption tools, access control systems, and continuous monitoring applications to ensure secure access is always maintained regardless of external circumstances.

5. Compliance and Legal

Connected cloud environments are very often geographically distributed. In practice, this means they can cross multiple legal jurisdictions and zones that change how applications and data are regulated. It takes knowledge and experience to know what regulations to apply in the right context to keep on top of potential issues.

How to Leverage Cloud Integration Well

The various challenges, pitfalls, and use cases for cloud integration technologies can be an intimidating barrier to entry. Failure to overcome this hurdle keeps many organizations stuck with a single cloud provider or in-house solution for years if not decades. The limitations of this approach are becoming increasingly unacceptable in today's tech environment.

Luckily, access to the wider ecosystem of cloud technologies and integrations is closer than you think.

If you need help upgrading from a single cloud solution to broaden your capabilities or assistance in extending in-house hardware to deploy the power of the cloud then submit a brief to let us know. We'll connect you with teams of experienced cloud integration engineers to deliver technologies to you fast.

FAQ

What is Cloud Integration?

Cloud integration is the deployment of systems and tools to seamlessly connect data, applications, and processes between various cloud providers and on-premises systems. The goals of cloud integration are to maximize interoperability between each of these systems to create efficient business workflows and highly capable means of data sharing.

In practical use, cloud integrations can interconnect software solutions that lean on the power of AWS, Azure, Salesforce, and other cloud environments to break down data silos, enhance visibility, and maximize what a system can do.

What is Cloud Integration Strategy?

A cloud integration strategy is a plan for integrating cloud services into an organization's IT infrastructure. Done well, a cloud integration strategy should create a seamless connection between multiple systems and data sources that a business needs to operate effectively. There are multiple strategies a business might take when creating an effective cloud integration. Some of the most popular include:

• Point-to-point cloud integration
• Hub-and-spoke integration
• Hybrid integration
• API-based integration
• Even driven integration

What Are the Cloud Computing Solutions?

Cloud computing solutions span a broad range of services and provisions available on-demand to organizations. These often include virtualized computing infrastructure, storage solutions, and tools available to companies that need to rapidly expand using external resources.

For businesses, cloud computing solutions provide cost-effective IT services at scale to maximize flexibility and capabilities within the organization. The most common delivery models for cloud computing solutions include:

• PaaS (Platform as a Service), provides tools and resources for software development
• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), provides computing infrastructure to organizations
• SaaS (Software as a Service), delivering software to organizations
• FaaS (Function as a Service), delivering serverless computing and storage capabilities to businesses