The Covid-19 pandemic has emphasized the need for operational resilience in the wake of unexpected business disruptions. IT leaders have been busy reviewing their business processes and technology stacks to make sure they support one of the central mandates of executive leadership: business continuity. For many of these leaders, cloud services like integration platform as a service (iPaaS) are key to their strategic business continuity plans.
It is critical for businesses to have a blueprint to keep operations running in the event of disaster or disruption. Without one, businesses risk loss of revenue, negative impact on brand reputation, loss of critical data, breakdown of processes, and sometimes much worse – business failure.
Disruptions can come in many forms, such as natural disasters, cyber attacks, human error, and – as we are now learning – pandemics. You don’t want any of these events to be the black swan that temporarily or permanently halts your operations.
There are many real-world examples of major organizations being disrupted because they lacked a fool-proof business continuity plan. Recently, the city of Atlanta saw major city services disrupted because of a ransomware attack. In another case, a large law firm lost access to confidential client information and business data during hurricane Katrina. No business is impervious.
A comprehensive business continuity strategy should consider everything from processes and people to platforms and IT systems. The platforms aspect – especially data and application integration platforms – is critical since an integrated enterprise is critical to your digital business.
Integration is a critical component of your digital transformation initiatives, which support business continuity.
Take for example the employee onboarding process. In the past, it might have been a manual, lengthy, and error-prone task that required manual data entry into various disparate and siloed systems, increasing the risk of failure. With real-time integration across systems and process automation, the entire onboarding process can be reduced to a fraction of the time. And thanks to the elimination of manual entry, the process can be completed without errors. New hires are automatically onboarded and business continuity is maintained.
Another example is in the complex supply chain world. Businesses like Amazon have complex multi-echelon supply chains consisting of multiple partners, workflows, and systems. When supply chain processes are integrated and automated, they can operate with minimal manual intervention across back-end and partner systems. Everything just works, business runs as usual, and integration is one of the key reasons why.
For IT teams, iPaaS eliminates the burden of costly development and upkeep that they face if they choose to hand code integration scripts. In recent years, iPaaS has emerged as the de facto way of designing efficient data and application integration. Compared to costly hand coding, it requires little maintenance and provides out-of-the-box connectivity to a wide array of systems and applications.
The right iPaaS solution can help streamline and automate integration across multiple systems while eliminating errors and costly maintenance – a fact that itself can enhance IT’s business continuity posture. Informatica has been hard at work adding and improving features to Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – the industry’s leading iPaaS. One area where we have made significant investments in our latest release relates to features and capabilities that support business continuity. Here are some examples:
As you look toward future-proofing your application and data integration strategy and adopting technologies to embark on major projects such as cloud data warehousing and application modernization, your choice of technology plays a critical role in your success. Informatica not only offers the most comprehensive iPaaS in the market today, it underpins its core technology with key features and capabilities that ensure your operations are resilient to disruptions.
Sep 08, 2021
Sep 08, 2021
