Many organisations do not have the luxury of simply developing a new IT strategy. It is often ambitious enough to evolve the existing architecture quickly. For example, when, as in the case of a pandemic, there is a need to act quickly, IT management may not always be able to resoundingly say ‘Yes! This must be different and this can be different.
IT should be the engine that helps your organisation make quick decisions and develop and roll out new initiatives quickly. A well-thought-out integration strategy, where data from different environments and applications can be accessed unambiguously, quickly and securely, can make all the difference in the digital age.
Most organisations today have a hybrid IT architecture. New applications are brought in from the cloud, while older applications still run on-premises. The important data exchange within this hybrid structure is often not addressed until problems arise. When building a new application that needs information from different systems, a one-off solution is often chosen. This leads to even more point-to-point integrations, making the IT architecture more inflexible, expensive and inefficient.
It is often thought that the integration problem will disappear if enough new systems are acquired in the cloud that support the RestAPI standard. However, legacy applications do not disappear as quickly as thought. Moreover, integrating different SaaS applications using APIs is not the responsibility of the vendors of these applications. An integration strategy is not just about choosing an API standard, but about a reliable, secure and clear strategy for retrieving and modifying data from any application. This is where API Management plays a crucial role.
Bypassing or even breaking down the barriers between platforms, applications and systems requires a team of integration experts. Choosing the platform on which to build, manage and secure these integrations is, of course, also key. This can be on-premise under your own management if you have and want to keep all the expertise in-house or as a Managed Service ‘as a Service’ where you leave everything to specialists for a fixed monthly fee. Everything is possible, you decide.
If you want a flexible IT architecture that can support your organisation when needed, it is essential to first get your integration strategy right. Our specialists will be happy to help you make your choice.
