In the world of business and digitalization, there are many services available that can benefit almost any organization out there. One of these services is called integration platform as a service, or iPaaS for short. An iPaaS is a software as a service, or SaaS, that includes cloud characteristics such as accessibility from anywhere with an internet connection. iPaaS software can be molded to your business needs and will help simplify the integration process with apps in any environment.
What is iPaaS software?
An iPaaS software is a set of cloud services that help enable the development, execution, and governance of integration. It can be combined with on-premise and cloud-based processes, services, and apps within an individual organization or multiple ones. They provide prebuilt connectors, rules, and transformations that help with the development of applications.
How does iPaaS software work?
iPaaS software consists of host servers and infrastructure data as well as integration programs and tools to help developers build, test, and deploy applications. These tools will also help the development team manage any software that resides in the cloud. iPaaS software will expand a company’s offerings without having to build more services — they need only to integrate with another software that already offers the desired service.
What are some examples of how iPaaS software works?
A simple example of this could be if you own a barbershop, you can use a scheduling app to help your clients set their own appointments and then have that app send the appointment information to your calendar. At the enterprise level, an iPaaS software can have a wide array of integrations such as application to application (e.g., the barbershop example), microservices, B2B, data, platform, IoT devices, big data, multiple clouds, and event streaming.
An example of a microservice integration would be when an organization uses an existing API to not have to design it themselves. A B2B integration would include the automation of a process with a third-party business partner, such as the transformation of documents into another format to comply with a business partner’s safety protocols. Additionally, when integrating IoT devices, you can have various sensors that communicate with different devices in your shop. For example, in a manufacturing line, you can have a sensor that detects the placement of certain items in a conveyor belt. Your sensor can send a signal to your devices if there is a missing item at any given point.
Likewise, a big data integration example includes the handling of complex integrations of business analytics and intelligence with machine learning and AI. This can be present in the health-care environment, for example, when a hospital wants to combine all of the medical records of all of their patients into one single system. This can help the hospital control costs and improve patient outcomes and treatments, as well as increasing the awareness of the patients’ health and wellness.
What are some iPaaS software features?
Some features of iPaaS software include the ease of platform deployment and app management processes as well as the preparation to support SaaS and hosted apps. They can also monitor failures in real time and provide live support for any data integration processes. Moreover, they have security mechanisms that can help for access control as well as data encryption and single sign-on integrations.
What are the benefits of iPaaS software?
Some benefits that come with iPaaS software include the ability to help the IT teams to explore the integration requirements of a business without having to add any additional resources or overhead management. It also helps strengthen the security in a business by adhering to the security measures of the iPaaS vendor, which can provide built-in monitoring and threat detection among other security tools.