Beyond the hype - the foundations of cloud modernisation
Author: Felipe Henao Brand, Senior Product Manager, Talend
According to Gartner, global spending on cloud services is expected to reach more than $482 billion by 2022; by comparison, the market generated $313 billion in 2020.
While organizations have accelerated their transition to the cloud since the pandemic in order to adapt to a new way of working and to a brand new world, this transition is not always easy. The lack of resources, inflexible or expensive solutions, the increasing concerns about sovereignty, are all reasons that can slow down a transition to a data architecture in the cloud. However, cloud is a powerful lever for developing and sustaining an organization's business because it offers a unique ability to adapt and enables the operationalization of new use cases much more easily.
The urgency for cloud modernization is pushing organizations to re-think their approach to data management
Why a cloud integration platform
Traditional business development depended upon the specialized domain knowledge of experts in departments like warehousing, sales, marketing, finance, and others. This approach took advantage of deep expertise, but that critical information ended up locked in data silos. With each group’s data isolated within a single department, there were limited opportunities for sharing data or insights between teams. As a result, the whole company suffered.
With the advent of business intelligence, however, organizations developed an appetite for mining, discovering, and sharing data across departments to improve overall performance. By setting up APIs and connectors to free up the flow of data between silos, cloud integration supports business intelligence initiatives and helps to optimize all manner of critical business processes.
With cloud integration platforms, an organization can enhance local data stored in on-premises systems with important information pulled from cloud applications. This includes a wealth of information that might not be available to any individual department, including user behavior, compliance information or security events.
Businesses and the cloud
There is no one single reason to adopt a cloud integration platform. Beyond basic goals of improving business processes and staying up-to-date with increasingly complex compliance regulations, today’s leading industries use cloud integration to achieve breakthroughs in all kinds of areas. These advantages are wide-ranging, and include such benefits as:
Lowered expenses — By diving deep into data from individual sources and apps, you get a better picture of areas where resources may be over- (or under-) committed so you can prepare a cloud integration approach that fits your specific business needs.
Maximized human capital — Not even a crack team of IT pros could possibly ingest and interpret the amount of data flowing through an entire organization with human power alone. With the right integration tools and design, proper task automation, and comprehensive reporting options, your existing resources can make a much bigger impact.
Autoscaling — Save costs and improve scalability by adding resources during peak times and shutting them down over slower periods. As more organizations move operations from on-premises applications to virtual platforms hosted in the cloud, it becomes more and more important to use automation to manage resources.
Faster delivery — Business today moves faster than ever. By shifting integration flows — and other key workflows — to the cloud, your applications can instantly exchange real-time data.
That last one is particularly significant: industry leaders are aggressively adopting cutting-edge approaches like continuous delivery and DevOps. Both philosophies call for near-real-time delivery cycles that can’t be accomplished without extensive automation. This inevitably involves a complex network of SaaS applications and cloud computing solutions. Solving for speed calls for new thinking about the definition of modern data integration.
Digital delivery helps you make important decisions quickly.
Defining the future of data integration
Within the next decade or two, automation could open countless new possibilities — things like instant release cycles or even integration solutions that can overcome performance challenges by designing their own helper applications.
As exciting as these possibilities are, that world comes with its own pitfalls. Who will design the guiding automation? What role will humans play in a continuous cloud integration cycle — and how will we keep hold of the reins in such a fast-paced data race? Leaders in the space will have to balance these questions and more as we push the functionality of application integration into the next generation of technical advancement.
What’s not in question is that data management will play a pivotal role in the evolution of cloud integration. Within a cloud environment, data integration lives at the intersection of big data, advanced analytics, business intelligence, and data governance.
