E-Guide CHALLENGES OF SAAS APPLICATION INTEGRATION

Transcription

1 E-Guide CHALLENGES OF SAAS APPLICATION INTEGRATION

2 W hen companies need to integrate their inhouse s and SaaS s, old tools and ad hoc methods won t stand up to challenges in orchestration, security, data transformation and more. Old ways die hard, however, so many organizations are behind the curve on enterprise-saas app integration. This expert eguide provides best practices for developing new strategies to beat challenges of integrating cloud. PAGE 2 OF 15

3 WHY SAAS APPLICATION INTEGRATION REQUIRES NEW STRATEGIES, TOOLS Jan Stafford When companies need to integrate their in-house s and SaaS s, old tools and ad hoc methods won t stand up to challenges in orchestration, security, data transformation and more. Old ways die hard, however, so many organizations are behind the curve on enterprise-saas app integration, say Gartner Research and 451 Research analysts. What do organizations have to do to make on-premises and cloud s play well together? Software integration experts reveal why traditional software integration approaches fail and which new tools and strategies work. Application integration got lost in the cloud rush, said Benoit Lheureux, vice president of research firm Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. Hustling to catch up with virtualization and cloud advances, many organizations failed to perform due diligence on how they d integrate and synchronize data between on-premises and cloud. Ironically, Lheureux added, virtualization and cloud are driving the requirements for integration. PAGE 3 OF 15

4 The fact that SaaS vendors don t provide a complete integration solution came as a nasty surprise to many early adopters of cloud. There was a misperception that because every cloud provider had an API, app integration was auto-magical, said Lheureux. Cloud vendors APIs aren t the answer in most cases, because they re frequently proprietary, long and complicated, he said, referring to Force.com APIs with more than 500 pages of specs. IT organizations also assumed cloud integration could be done with traditional integration technologies, likeextract, transform, load (ETL), external EDI and FTP services for integration between s and types of businesses.. The problem is that these tools are expensive, require a lot of skills and aren t necessarily designed to work the way a cloud system would work, said Carl Lehman, who covers enterprise architecture, integration and BPM for 451 Research in New York. For the last five years, Lheureux has seen companies dealing with integration on a one-off, ad hoc basis every time they got a new SaaS app. Until you get a few cloud projects under your belt, you don t appreciate just how complex integration is, he said. Now they have a mess and must start applying a rational discipline across all types of s. PAGE 4 OF 15

5 HURDLES IN CLOUD, ENTERPRISE APP INTEGRATION IT organizations that want to integrate multiple SaaS solutions from multiple vendors with multiple on-premises s face complex problems, said Lehman, including the following: ensuring transformation as data goes from one system to the other, from on-premises to the cloud; maintaining the connections and the data exchange with the same level of security that organizations had in the enterprise; having the right types of connections to accommodate the volumes of data and interaction between the two systems; and orchestrating data flow to get the right data to the right system at the right time, and, in doing so, creating a comprehensive, cohesive information scheme and not silos of information. Orchestration is the most-needed integration functionality, in Lehman s PAGE 5 OF 15

6 opinion. Users need a graphic visual interface that allows them to look at the status of quality, security, liability and accuracy of all the data to be able to manage and orchestrate them accordingly. SAAS PROVIDERS APP INTEGRATION CAPABILITIES Today, many SaaS providers specialize in their s unique capabilities and don t address integration, Lheureux and Lehman said. They advise users to carefully assess the integration functionality SaaS vendors can provide, plus their own capabilities and which third-party cloud-enterprise integration solutions could fill the gap between the two. Focus SaaS vendor technology evaluations on the quality and capabilities of transformation, security, the volume and the orchestration solutions, said Lehman. Make certain that the SaaS vendor is capable of exposing data in a standardized way so it can be used by an integration service provider or an on-premises enterprise integration technology, like an enterprise service bus. The emergence of third-party integration service providers has kept SaaS integration projects going. Third-party tools -- from Dell (Boomi), MuleSoft, PathLogic, Jitterbit, Kapow, Talend, Vitria, TIBCO and Red Hat, IBM (Cast Iron) -- assist with SaaS to on-premises integration. PAGE 6 OF 15

7 Their prices are reasonable for small to mid-size companies and [they] also translate departmental solutions in larger enterprises, Lehman said. I would rely on those types of vendors to assist in integration. Gotchas when working with integration services providers include pricing models that change with scale, volume or number of users. Be aware of how their pricing models scale so you can budget for that, said Lehman. Most SaaS vendors will provide greater integration capabilities in the future, he said. Lheureux thinks that time can t come too soon and believes that cloud providers have been remiss in offering integration as an add-on and not an included-in solution. Redirecting your customers to a third-party for integration solutions when integration is a requirement in every IT project of substance is falling short of meeting your customer requirements, said Lheureux. SaaS providers should have bitten the bullet and given their customers integration capabilities, rather than forcing customers to buy them from a third party. Lheureux pointed to Workday as an example of a company that has ponied up with integration systems, providing the, middleware and integration middleware in a bundle (or SaaS and ipaas). He predicts that Microsoft will offer integration as a feature of Azure. PAGE 7 OF 15

8 CLOUD INTEGRATION DISCIPLINE AND STRATEGY To break down barriers to cloud integration, DevOps should also change from ad hoc to company-wide standard practices. You can t be successful in managing an evolving, constantly changing portfolio if you are not really disciplined at doing integration, said Lheureux. For most organization, there s still time to craft a cloud-to-enterprise integration strategy. Right now, everyone s going slowly, said Lehman. They re not shifting their entire enterprise to a SaaS model. They re doing it departmentally or by function. Start strategy planning with standardizing ways to master the four main challenges mentioned earlier: transformation, security, volume and orchestration, said Lehman. From there, said Lheureux, create a coherent, disciplined integration strategy that works across all sources of data -- in-house or cloud, behind or outside the enterprise firewall. Before buying, make an informed decision about how a piece of the cloud will be integrated. A coherent strategy doesn t necessarily mean using only one solution, one technology approach or one implementation approach, said Lheureux. Certainly, organizations benefit from using one infrastructure for integration, no matter where data and process logic resides. Within that PAGE 8 OF 15

9 framework, however, have a portfolio of technologies and models you can use on a case-by-case basis based on predefined criteria. A final word of advice: Treat integration artifacts as valuable assets. Maintain them for reuse. Whether you re connecting to a dozen clouds or connecting to a thousand external trading partners, all of the interface definitions, maps for translations and so on are valuable for continued use when cloud and/ or enterprise s are updated or replaced and trading partners come and go. PAGE 9 OF 15

10 BEAT CHALLENGES OF INTEGRATING SAAS APPS WITH ON-PREMISES LEGACY APPS Crystal Bedell Organizations are increasingly turning to software-as-a-service (SaaS) to address business needs, but while end users are realizing the benefits of cloudbased software -- ease of procurement, anywhere accessibility and improved productivity -- integration and software architects are struggling to make it work with on-premises s. Integration with enterprise s, identity management and access control is often made more challenging by the fact that it is an afterthought for many organizations. SaaS creates silos of customers information in the cloud in the SaaS vendors data centers. You typically want to integrate with your data center, and you have to figure out how to make that integration occur [which] needs to happen even before you pick your SaaS, said Blue Mountain Labs founder and CTO David Linthicum. Linthicum said it s important to take an architecture approach and determine how SaaS fits into an existing configuration. PAGE 10 OF 15

11 Once or twice a month, Linthicum hears from an organization that says it has, just stood up a huge SaaS installation and needs to know how to get the information back on premises, he said. It needs to be retrofitted, and data is out of sync, and it becomes a mess. Historically, companies have split business systems into separate environments. The SaaS is the stuff they don t worry about, and the back office is the stuff they manage, said enstratius Inc. founder and CTO George Reese. When it comes to tying them together, there s a technology gap there that they have to overcome. While many company business models focus on being the glue among SaaS services, Reese noted there are also tools that make it easier. However, those that exist are about holding together well-known services. According to Jason Bloomberg, president of ZapThink LLC, a Dovel Technologies company, these tools go by a number of names, including businessto-business integration, cloud governance and API management tools. Other tools fit into the category as well, Bloomberg said, including next-generation B2B integration tools, SOA management tools and XML appliances. All the vendors are jumping around playing hokey-pokey, said Bloomberg. What really has changed? They ve made some updates but it s really all the PAGE 11 OF 15

12 same stuff. Linthicum said it s not a lack of technology, but of knowledge that creates a challenge. The technology is there. We just don t have the strategic knowledge [or] know how all these pieces and parts work and play with our existing infrastructure, processes, data -- all the things we have to keep track of, he said. Bloomberg said integration of this nature has always presented hurdles. For example, he noted many people misunderstood Web services and now, similarly, REST. One will likely have to work with REST or SOAP services, according to Reese, to make a custom system talk to an obscure SaaS service. THE API CHALLENGE When integration options are considered in choosing SaaS, the robustness and openness of program interfaces (APIs) is a critical criteria, according to Linthicum. If APIs are well defined, as in SalesForce, integration becomes easy, he said. If you re using a lesser-known player without APIs or that s less sophisticated, things are a bit of a challenge. While Linthicum advises organizations to look at and test API sets, Reese recommends considering the cost of assessing those APIs. Some SaaS vendors PAGE 12 OF 15

13 require customers to upgrade their services to obtain access to APIs. An organization may only need services for a couple users but have to subscribe to enterprise-level service to obtain the APIs. Integration with SalesForce is what 90% of the world cares about, said Reese. The other bit is with social media type SaaS systems. Largely that involves talking to the APIs of these systems and integrating that data with other systems within the enterprise. INTEGRATING IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT While several issues may arise when with on-premises, Brightfly Inc. managing director Brandon Dunlap said, user provisioning, deprovisioning, and identity and access control, are among the biggest. Reese agrees. That s, for a lot of organizations, where things get really ugly, he said. That problem has been solved, but the interesting thing is most people aren t thinking about that in any strategic sense. Although he s surprised there hasn t been greater uptake of identity and access management solutions, Reese thinks he knows why. I think that identity management isn t the problem people are trying to solve when they go out to the cloud -- they get SalesForce, they need a finance PAGE 13 OF 15

14 package -- and, over time, they find out they have a dozen cloud-based they interact with daily, and it s a pain in the butt and at that point they say, I have to deal with it. Also, the price tag isn t cheap for these services, said Reese. When first trying to integrate a cloud app with a back-end system, identity management is very important, according to Reese. It s a problem that gets bigger, he said, because it s not the main thing that comes to mind. Integrating identity management is not too difficult. The identity piece is all built around open standards. There are libraries that will help you do it, said Reese. The real potential roadblock, according to Reese, is how forward or backwards thinking the architecture is that will be integrated. With modern architecture, things should go smoothly, but it will be a rockier ride if it s really backwards. PAGE 14 OF 15

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