Is 2021 the year of iPaaS?

With software as a service (SaaS) use in the cloud soaring, adopting best-of-breed SaaS apps has created a huge integration challenge.

Gartner projects that global revenue from public cloud technologies will reach $330 billion by 2022; SaaS will dominate that with $144 billion, an increase of 80% from 2018.

The SaaS rush to cloud has been further accelerated by the pandemic, as companies clamor to support remote, globally distributed teams, workloads, employees, customers, and partners. But, adopting multiple best-of-breed SaaS applications creates huge integration challenges.

This has propelled iPaaS the main solution for integrating all these SaaS applications with a cloud solution – and more.

Why iPaas?

The main advantages to iPaaS are:

• Eliminates integration silos to connect all systems and applications
• Supports use cases spanning SaaS, on-premises and mainframe applications, B2B and partner integration, file integration, IoT integration and API management
• Allows business analysts (citizen integrators) to develop integrations on their own as a self-service capability while providing flexibility as users can work from anywhere
• Scales on demand to meet the requirements of the business

It differs from traditional approaches like Enterprise Service Bus because it has greatly simplified the development and deployment of integrations, with a web-based UI (as opposed to Eclipse tooling for ESBs) and allows non-technical users to easily build integrations using drag/drop tooling.

Design time for iPaaS is also highlighted by simplicity which means that the focus is on high productivity rather than high control which is the hallmark of ESBs. On the deployment side, central IT no longer has to run, manage, maintain and update servers as they did with ESBs, since iPaaS is a cloud service; the service provider takes care of managing your instances and dynamically scaling as your needs grow.

Increasingly, iPaaS is being selected by central IT as a single hybrid integration platform with extending across public cloud, private cloud and on-premises.

What about multi-cloud?

A multi-cloud environment means that data and applications are stored on cloud platforms from different providers. An iPaaS is, by definition, multi-everything, since it must integrate SaaS applications hosted on different public and private cloud providers as well as on-premises applications hosted in private data centers.

Public cloud environments are readily available subject to the security models enforced by the cloud provider for authentication and authorization. Access to private cloud and on-premises data centers is harder since direct access may not be available without use of a VPN or private link.

Once these access links are established then an iPaaS can effectively integrate across all these environments and seamlessly present the data to an integration developer.

There isn’t much that iPaaS cannot do. Try webMethods.io for free and learn why 2021 is going to be the year of iPaaS.