WHITE PAPER Planning your Integration Journey: Five Essential Considerations When Choosing your Microsoft Integration Tools
02 White Paper Planning your Integration Journey FIVE KEY CONSIDERATIONS BEFORE CHOOSING YOUR MICROSOFT INTEGRATION TOOLS 03 1. Business Drivers 04 2. Information Flow 05 3. Existing IT Infrastructure & Your Desired Service Model 07 4 Security & Organisational Policies 09 5. Features & Capabilities 11 FINAL THOUGHTS 13 ABOUT MEXIA 14 PREFACE Enterprise business has been irreversibly changed by cloud computing. Your organisation now has multiple applications, sensors, devices and partner organisations that must work together in order to fulfill your business objectives, and optimise your business processes. You ve recognized a need for rapid integration if you are to prosper in this new environment. If you are investigating the potential of integration for your organisation, you re bound to have an abundance of questions. They may include: Where do I start? What type of technology is involved? What kind of features might I need from my integration platform? How will it impact my current operations and infrastructure? We recognise the value in clear exploration of these issues, and have devised this paper to share the insights of Mexia s long experience with integration and Microsoft s cloud and on-premises technologies. Within, you ll find the key factors you will need to consider before choosing an integration platform. Each has important implications, whether you are looking at deploying onpremises, cloud, or hybrid integration platforms in the near, medium or long term. Forthcoming papers from Mexia will examine the key distinctions between your BizTalk Server and Azure pathways, and illustrate not just the integration technologies involved, but also their core benefits and how their deployment will relate practically to your organisation. This information will assist in understanding the decisionmaking necessary for your integration journey, and a much clearer path to determining the solution that best matches your needs.
White Paper Planning your Integration Journey 03 FIVE KEY INTEGRATION CONSIDERATIONS Developing an integration strategy requires you to ascertain the particulars of your environment. There are five key factors that will determine the approach that best suits your needs. The following breakdown will provide you with a good oversight of what these considerations are, and help you identify your specific integration requirements.
04 White Paper Planning your Integration Journey 1 BUSINESS DRIVERS To begin, it is important to fully understand your business drivers when deciding whether you need to make integration a part of your digital strategy to both modernise your business and streamline your processes. The best integration solution for your organisation is going to depend on your business motivations, values, and requirements both tactically and strategically. Consider the following: Does your organisation have a strategy or vision to use cloud technology, and what are your motivations? Are you simply looking to cut costs? A cloud-based solution is not guaranteed to be cheaper. If cost cutting is your primary concern, then an alternative solution may need to be crafted in order to guarantee that outcome in both the short and long terms. Do you have a well-functioning IT services team and are they efficient? Do they have the capacity to support additional on-premises infrastructure? If you need to provision and deploy new on-premises infrastructure, are there any processes involved within your organisation which can incur significant project delays or additional costs? Are you ready to invest in upskilling your IT staff if necessary? How comfortable are you with the idea of employees being empowered with self-service? All of these questions may affect how committed your organisation is to on-premises infrastructure and therefore how deeply you might consider hybrid models. Or, they may give you the extra incentive to go cloud only. Would there be new market opportunities if your business strategy embraced the use of the cloud? Are you trying to increase your business agility by streamlining your business processes and introducing more automation? Have you recently examined your business processes and optimised them as much as possible before looking towards technology as part of the solution? Are you being forced to embrace the cloud in order to keep using your business partner s services? Are you trying to remain competitive in your industry and win back customers by investing more in functionality rather than infrastructure? Above all, make sure you ask yourself this vital question: Are you committed to embracing the possibilities of the cloud, or is it just being used as a token trendy buzzword?
White Paper Planning your Integration Journey 05 2 INFORMATION FLOW It is useful to develop an early understanding of your business s typical and expected data usage pattern. Armed with this knowledge, you can ensure that your integration solution has been designed to accommodate the specifics of how data is handled within your organisation. Capacity & Scale Some useful questions to ask about your capacity and scale requirements include: What is the typical shape of your data usage? Does your organisation need to transmit or receive a high volume of data on a daily basis for normal traffic and/or backups? How and when does the volume of your data usage vary? Are there periodic bursts of activity or natural peaks and troughs in workload around your business activities? Are there any periodic or seasonal influences? Do you have the need to reliably ingest millions of messages or sensor readings from devices per second and/or perform real-time analytics and machine learning on that data? Is high performance with short network latency times more important than being able to transfer a large volume of data? Similarly, if you are already using a cloud hosting provider, what type of data and how much of it is being transferred into that data centre? What are the associated data transfer fees? Cloud providers typically charge for data transiting into their data centre, out of their data centre, or in both directions.
06 White Paper Planning your Integration Journey Traffic Reach Another aspect of your business s data usage pattern is the reach and direction of your data traffic. Consider the following: From where does the data originate? To where is the data going? Is the data typically coming from and staying within your on-premises data centre? Is the data typically coming from your onpremises data centre and going to the Internet, or a cloud data centre? Is the data typically coming from the Internet or a cloud data centre and going to your onpremises data centre? Is the data typically coming from and staying within a cloud data centre? Data that originates from the internet could be from: Web applications and e-commerce; Mobile applications; Internet of Things (IoT) devices or sensors; Business to Business (B2B) communications; or Providing Software as a Service (SaaS) Comparatively, data that originates from your on-premises or cloud data centre is typically your Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) data from internal applications and systems. Now that you understand the source of - and destination for - your data, you need to assess what the expected or required performance metrics might be. For example: What is the time duration for the data to make that journey end-to-end? Is it near real-time? Is it delayed or batched? Is the route that the data takes reasonably direct, or are there many hops, waypoints or intermediate steps to process, analyse or just retransmit the data? All of this must be understood in order to design an integration solution that will satisfy your needs, and support future growth in your business.
White Paper Planning your Integration Journey 07 3 EXISTING IT INFRASTRUCTURE & YOUR DESIRED SERVICE MODEL The design of your integration solution will depend on the amount of physical IT infrastructure your business already owns, and its expected life. If your organisation is already heavily invested in a large amount of physical IT infrastructure and support staff, it can be more cost-effective to keep your existing on-premises infrastructure and slowly and selectively move into the cloud as your IT expenditure budgets allow. It is also important to consider your business strategy and what your vision and direction is for your existing on-premises infrastructure. This will help identify what your desired service model should be. Software can be hosted on-premises, or in the cloud with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or as Software as a Service (SaaS).
08 White Paper Planning your Integration Journey The following diagram explains the various service models available to you when choosing what path to take on your integration platform journey. Each model describes the full stack of capabilities required to establish an integration platform, with the only variation being the level of capabilities you consume as-a-service with the remaining provided by yourself and Mexia as your partner. SERVICE MODELS On-premises IaaS PaaS SaaS Integration Components Integration Components Integration Components Integration Components Operational Support Operational Support Operational Support Operational Support Runtime Runtime Runtime Runtime Middleware Middleware Middleware Middleware O/S O/S O/S O/S Virtualisation Virtualisation Virtualisation Virtualisation Server Hardware Server Hardware Server Hardware Server Hardware Storage Storage Storage Storage Networking Networking Networking Networking Managed by You Managed by Microsoft Managed by Mexia Figure 1 - Service Models and their management Azure IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) IaaS provides the fundamental layer of computing resources. Sitting at the bottom of the stack, it replaces the need for traditional, physical hardware such as servers, networking and storage arrays, by allowing for virtual equivalents that can be created, configured, and reconfigured according to changing requirements. With IaaS, your organisation (or Mexia s Managed Service team) is primarily responsible for everything down to the level of the virtual machine. The underlying infrastructure that runs the virtual machine is Microsoft s responsibility. Azure PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) While IaaS operates at the operating system level of computing resources, PaaS represents the layer above and provides a runtime and application hosting environment in which code can be developed and deployed. PaaS therefore represents a cost-effective answer to many development, test, and production use-cases across market verticals and tiers. While IaaS still requires users to handle the responsibilities of maintaining the software element of the stack, with PaaS solutions the platform vendor i.e., Microsoft handles everything from the raw computing resources to the O/S and runtime environment, leaving you or Mexia s Managed Services team to look after your data and applications. Azure ipaas (Integration Platform-as-a-Service) IPaaS is generally considered as a hosted integration service offering, or set of cloud-based integration tools that enable the development, execution, integration and governance of applications and services across any combination of on-premises and cloud. Customers, whether within an individual organization or across multiple organisations, can drive development and deployment without the need for installing hardware or middleware.
White Paper Planning your Integration Journey 09 4 SECURITY & ORGANISATIONAL POLICIES There is no point designing and developing a solution with a given technology if business policies, security concerns, or regulatory factors prevent you or your customers from using it. Typically, there are two major areas that you will need to carefully consider the ramifications of when planning your integration: data sovereignty, and security. Data Sovereignty Data sovereignty is a large concern to many organisations. If you knew that your cloud data centre was located in Australia and that your data would not travel overseas, could you then use the cloud? Do you have legal & regulatory restrictions that make using the cloud a challenge? Has Microsoft Azure already been certified for usage in your organisation? Does your organisation have a policy against cloud platform adoption, and do you know why it s there? Can that policy be challenged if the business, technology and operations requirements can be met or exceeded? If you knew that you could have a network connection that is isolated from the Internet (e.g. Azure ExpressRoute) to privately transfer data between your organization and the cloud datacenter, would that make a difference? Perhaps you have some applications or systems that really need to remain on-premises: a very common scenario. Would it be acceptable to have a hybrid approach where you use the cloud for some systems, and not others? Security Microsoft has dedicated teams that focus exclusively on making the Azure infrastructure resilient to attacks and keeping your customer data safe. Network communications can be securely encrypted, and data can also be encrypted at rest. Do you know your organisations security requirements and can they be easily met with network & infrastructure security? Microsoft s cloud infrastructure supports more than one billion customers around the globe. Azure itself has more than 240 million user accounts, in companies and organizations across 127 countries that entrust their mission-critical data to Microsoft. With more than 20 years of experience, their timetested approach to privacy and data protection is grounded in their commitment to give their customers complete control over their own data. Azure meets a broad set of international and industry-specific compliance standards and is regularly audited by third parties to ensure compliance. For more information, see Azure Trust Centre at azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/trust-center
10 White Paper Planning your Integration Journey To help better understand your organisational requirements around data sovereignty and security, ask yourself the following questions: Are there any reasons that your organisation would not be allowed to deploy software solutions to the cloud? The answer to this question will have the biggest impact on the design of your integration solution, and thus impact the total cost of ownership. Are there external industry or legal regulations and compliance rules that your organisation must abide by? Perhaps some of those are only a perceived impediment to deploying into the cloud? Regulations usually do not specifically prohibit the use of the cloud instead they typically refer to security and data sovereignty requirements. As long as those requirements can be fulfilled by the cloud hosting provider, there should be no impediment to deploying into the cloud. Does your organisation have a nonnegotiable policy against using cloud-based platforms? You should strive to understand the reasoning for such a policy, to ensure that its assumptions and premises are not outdated or inaccurate. Perhaps such a policy was created years ago when cloud technology was not mainstream, or perhaps it was created for political reasons? Addressing the real motivations behind such a policy with modern-day facts could positively revolutionise your organisation, with far reaching implications for unlocking its capacity to innovate. It therefore pays to rigourously assess what restrictions you may face, as it will determine what you are capable of achieving with your integration platform.
White Paper Planning your Integration Journey 11 5 FEATURES & CAPABILITIES A well-designed integration platform that can enable your digital strategy should be functionally rich and consist of many technical capabilities. Figure 2 on the following page shows Mexia s conceptual reference architecture for a modern integration platform that will scale and grow with your business. Our reference architecture can be grouped into three main areas of capability: API Gateway The capabilities of the API Gateway should include: security, an API or service registry, discoverability, throttling, quotas, rate limits, caching, health monitoring, usage analytics, a developer-focused portal and an administrator-focused portal. Hybrid Integration Platform The features of a Hybrid Integration Platform should include: cloud or on-premises hosting and security; the ability to queue and publish/subscribe messages; guaranteed, reliable, durable and ordered message delivery; the scope to perform message transformation and business process orchestration; the ability to track and monitor business activities, perform operational monitoring and support and process batches of messages; handle errors, perform auditing, logging, reporting, alerting and handle endpoint failover; and also load balancing and disaster recovery capabilities. Protocol translation includes the ability to communicate with or using various technologies, such as HTTP, RESTful services, SOAP services, email, SFTP, databases, Business to Business gateways, and Software as a Service (SaaS). Integration Lifecycle Management The capabilities of Integration Lifecycle Management should include: build and test automation, source control management, machine provisioning, and release management and deployment automation. Ascertaining the features and capabilities best suited for your needs is therefore a must. Integration platforms contain many out-of-the-box adapters, and custom adapters can be developed as necessary to satisfy your specific requirements though naturally, it pays to consider the cost implications of any such custom development in your overall strategy.
12 White Paper Planning your Integration Journey API GATEWAY Caching Security Usage Analytics Health Monitoring Throttling Developer Portal Administrator Portal Service Aggregation Quotas Rate Limits Discoverability Service Registry HYBRID INTEGRATION PLATFORM INTEGRATION LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT Build Automation Test Automation Branching & Versioning Developer Machine Provisioning Release Management & Deployment Automation Developer Productivity Tooling Publish & Subscribe Guaranteed Delivery Protocol Translation Versioning Queuing Fault-Tolerant, Reliable Messaging Message Transformation Logging & Reporting Security Durable Messaging Process Orchestration Error Handling Auditing Asynchronous Messaging Business Activity Monitoring Operational Monitoring Cloud or On-Premises Low-Latency Batch Processing Scalability Messaging Hybrid Connectivity Trading Partner Management / EDI Message Routing Disaster Recovery B2B Gateway / B2C Message Validation Reference Data Management Business Rules / Decision Management Service Composition High Availability Ordered Message Delivery & Processing Transaction Management Message Tracking Message Resubmission Platform Alerting & SLAs Endpoint Failover & Load Balancing Figure 2: Mexia s conceptual reference architecture for your modern integration platform
White Paper Planning your Integration Journey 13 FINAL THOUGHTS Mexia understands the challenges of platform integration. That s why we exist. We simplify the complexity of delivering enterprise-scale integration solutions on-premises and in the cloud, and we ve done it for some of the largest organisations in Australia. Azure and BizTalk Server represent the most complete integration platform offering on the market today, and are set to become even more robust and full-featured through Microsoft s commitment to persistently improving their products through active dialogue with its customer base. The strengths of Azure services in particular have been widely recognized, with Microsoft the only vendor positioned as a Leader across Gartner s Magic Quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, and Application Platform as a Service. We are confident that for organisations seeking to replatform, or to extend or upgrade their existing platforms in order to harness the full enterprise potentials of the cloud, the Microsoft stack is the strongest, most robust and full-featured approach to integration available in the market. As we have shown however, there is much to assess in order to determine which of the available pathways best suits the needs of your environment. For those who have weighed the options and seen the possibilities that an optimised integration solution can provide for their organisation, we encourage you to contact us and allow us to demonstrate the value of our experience. If you re ready to integrate, Mexia is ready to assist.
Confident. Capable. Committed. We love solving integration challenges in any form that s just what we do. The name Mexia is a play on the widely-used industry term MEX for message exchange. Originally specialising in building enterprise onpremises integration solutions with Microsoft BizTalk Server, Mexia was an early adopter of cloud computing. Now, we re also an Australian leader in integration, API and internet-of-things (IoT) solutions using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Mexia is a world-class integration consultancy demonstrating consistent growth year after year, recognition in the BRW Fast 100 for 3 years in a row, and were recent inclusions in the Deloitte Australia Fast 50 and CRN Fast 50 awards. Mexia combines a deeply talented team of integration specialists with a structured delivery methodology and proven technologies to take you from solution design to managed go-live with a minimum of hassle. We will lead from the front to engineer the best outcome for your business. World-class technical excellence. A deep focus on customer service and outcomes. A champion team that lives and breathes innovation. This is Mexia. 1300 734 127 mexia.com.au BRISBANE Level 1, 33 Longland Street Newstead QLD 4006 MELBOURNE Level 12, 385 Bourke Street Melbourne VIC 3000