Using Real Time Data Integration for Better Business Outcomes

Digital Transformation is Powered by Digital Integration

For developers to be able to quickly develop new apps and services, they need the most accurate, real time data from all data sources, cloud services and on-premises APIs. This is accomplished through real time data integration – the event-based data ingestion from source data stores, that includes data cleansing and validation policies, reconciliation mechanisms, support for various recovery and schema change scenarios, and monitoring, control and error handling. 

With enterprise-wide access to APIs, microservices and event-based data, developers can develop new apps and services more efficiently. Digital integration that incorporates not just data integration, but also includes API integration has become an essential part of digital transformation because it helps organizations move faster while reducing risk, by allowing them to focus on what matters most: their customers’ needs.

Unifying all your Data Sources

The future of your organization depends on how quickly you can embrace change—and that means unifying all your data sources. An Operational Data Hub can help you with this transition and continue delivering value for years to come. It is a powerful tool that transforms your IT landscape, allowing you to create an infrastructure that:

• Connects people, processes and technology in a way that makes it possible to deliver real-time business insights, from the integration of all data sources into a single, unified view
• Enables agile development where teams can collaborate more efficiently by accessing the same information in real-time, in any time zone or location, across both on-premises and cloud-based environments, creating a collaborative environment where knowledge sharing occurs naturally 

An Operational Data Hub is a digital platform that brings together the entire application portfolio – from legacy apps to cloud-native solutions – into one place. This data management platform quickly serves applications with accurate fresh and complete data from enterprise systems of record (SoR), delivering high performance, ultra-low latency, and an always-on digital experience. It decouples APIs from SoRs, using a module that replicates your data, making it available using event-driven architecture.

Connecting legacy systems  

You can integrate legacy systems into the Operational Data Hub so that they continue to support business-critical processes. The hub serves as an augmentation layer, creating an opportunity to streamline legacy systems with minimal risk to the business. Therefore your cloud journey can progress in stages, with no loss of service along the way.

What are the advantages of operational data hubs? Let’s look at two major benefits:

• Vastly improved performance 
• Streamlined processes 

In legacy or build-it-yourself systems, as shown in the diagram below, a simple request from the user or application has to undergo multiple stages, processes and products to facilitate an accurate and full response: 

DIY Data Access and API Serving

The main reason for the “back and forth” between the integration components is caused by the combination of different “best of breed” solutions involved in the process. Even when using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) or Data Virtualization Platform, we face three main challenges:

• Accessing many different stores and services is always a challenge, even when using an orchestration tool
• The weakest link in the chain will extend the overall latency in the response 
• Upkeep of such workflows and data access will ultimately cause data integrity issues or inconsistencies if someone missed or didn’t understand the flow correctly during future workflow updates

The conclusion here is that a combination of multiple products, “best of breed” though they may be, inadvertently causes complexity and latency by introducing network bottlenecks and increasing inter-process communication.

Increase developer productivity with an advanced Operational Data  Hub

The complexity of integrating applications, services and data across an organization is growing exponentially. Do you want your Dev and Engineering teams to focus on building, integrating, maintaining, monitoring and upgrading the software infrastructure – wouldn’t you prefer that they develop services and accelerate your business? 

Operational Data Hubs are becoming an integral part of managing digital transformation initiatives by simplifying the end-to-end design process. The Hub provides a single point of control where you can manage approvals, dependencies and quality assurance requirements across any IT project in your organization. With this new capability, developers will be able to access everything they need to make changes at any stage of their workflow—from design through development and QA, right up until deployment— within minutes rather than hours or days! 

Integrate over a hundred of your systems through connectors, libraries, and other technologies

Although this architecture sounds quite complex, it’s rather straightforward to see where it fits into the stack. As the following diagram shows, there are multiple integration points, starting from real-time ingestion via Embedded CDC, batch ingestion via ETL, and other ecosystem components.

With an operational data hub such as Smart DIH, you can:

• Deliver digital transformation without having to worry about application silos or IT silos
• Accelerate service development and deployment, and optimize API serving 
• Automate business processes across multiple apps using centralized governance
• Choose from multiple deployment options on the OpenShift Container Platform,  Managed Kubernetes Service, or a standalone installation
• Avoid risky deployment by testing your changes before putting them into production

As Smart DIH uses fewer software solutions from different vendors to build this integration workflow, it ultimately translates to fewer license costs, less integration and less maintenance. Examining the following request-response sequence flow when using Smart DIH seems strange at first, many arrows are missing, but that is not a mistake.

Since we’ve shifted from API Management or Data Virtualization “request-based” approaches to the “event-based” approach, we can consolidate operational data within the Smart DIH multi-modal distributed data store, which explains the right side of the pre-collected data flow.

On the left we can see a simple sequence flow where the “Data Access Layer” is deployed as a micro or macro-service within Smart DIH’s data fabric, resulting in a lower latency and higher concurrency API-based access pattern; this is standardized across the entire organization.

Following that, all advanced processing takes place within the data fabric, starting with filtering and aggregating using advanced indexes, using Lucene for text analysis, geospatial capabilities, event-driven functions and notifications, and much more. Since we provide a one-stop shop for the majority of the requirements, and reduce the number of products in the deployment, we can also reduce the end-to-end latency of the request-response process. This results in a high-performing solution that addresses the demand driven by the explosion of new digital applications. 

Get started fast with prebuilt blueprints that speed up development

A number of organizations are already using blueprints to deliver technology-based products and services that meet their business needs faster than ever before. With Smart DIH’s Service Blueprints for IT initiative, you can now build on that knowledge and accelerate the development process by using prebuilt blueprints to create Data Access Services quickly. 

Here’s how it works: blueprints are prebuilt solutions that can be customized as needed. You can use these solutions directly, or customize them by adding or removing components and then adjusting usability to fit the new business requirements with minimal effort. These stateless and stateful microservices have been deployed in thousands of production deployments, ranging from ultra-low-latency trading platforms, life-saving health care systems, and advanced transportation and aviation platforms, and have adapted their operations to new regulatory constraints such as the new WLTP testing standard. The Data Access Layer (DAL) decouples digital business applications and services from repeatedly accessing the SoRs for data, as these services are deployed onto the data fabric itself.

Digital services consume these “Data Access Services” via a standardized API, mainly REST, shifting the data consumption effort to these micro and macro services deployed within the fabric itself. This architectural change eliminates the anti-pattern heavily used by many organizations, which causes latency and throughput bottlenecks. When the DAL is part of the application itself, rather than the infrastructure fabric, governance and security challenges often occur such as with MERN or Full Java Stack architecture, where there’s an air gap between the DAL and the database.

When leveraging the operational data hub architecture, business services can request the data via a REST API. The data will undergo authorization, and authentication and receive appropriate certificates from the favorite enterprise vault at the API Gateway level. This transfers the request via a northbound entry point with appropriate credentials and certificates to the macro data access service running within the Hub’s data fabric. If this service requires the grid for data, it’s a simple microservice, which will return an ultra-low-latency response.

With that in mind, when the orchestration of microservices is required, it is often referred to as a composition in a composable architecture, and this internal service becomes a functional macro service acting as a coordinator. In short, such data access services can call one another and create a composition or even a composable map-reduce paradigm within the fabric, often used in real-time “what-if” scenarios in trading and insurance platforms.

Deliver new solutions with existing systems

Organizations can’t afford to live in silos anymore. They must provide enterprise-wide access to APIs, microservices and event-based data so developers can quickly develop new apps and services. Today, the typical IT department is charged with delivering on business needs while also keeping up with emerging technologies. The challenge becomes how to deliver new solutions efficiently without disrupting existing systems and processes.

Intermodal solutions require planning, integration, development and monitoring. Building the stack to support the requirements of different services and data types is a complex and cumbersome process. The following diagram illustrates the complexity of the workflow.

An Operational Data Hub addresses today’s integration challenges by offering a packaged solution that’s fast to deploy and easy to use and provides real-time, automated data integration across the enterprise (also relevant for Data Integration as a Service)  The Hub is a prebuilt real time data integration platform that enables companies to connect their applications with other systems in real time. This approach allows you to easily manage all of your data sources in one place—and it helps you meet performance requirements as required by business services, and become more agile, efficient and strategic. The result: better business outcomes like increased revenue or reduced costs.

To achieve these goals, organizations need an approach that enables them to:

• Bring new products, services and experiences to market faster, with less risk, while achieving resiliency and availability through virtualized integration outside their core systems.
• Support rapid application development through low-code and visual management tools that help developers quickly understand dependencies between applications as well as changes made during upgrades or patching cycles by providing real-time visibility into all aspects of the infrastructure stack—from hardware platforms down through operating system layers—that impact performance or availability issues (e.g., CPU utilization).

A better approach: get back to basics with a platform that allows you to manage your content at the data level 

You will need to provide enterprise-wide access to APIs, microservices and event-based data so developers can quickly develop new apps and services. The benefits of doing so are manifold:

• Access to data results in better business outcomes
• Your employees can be more productive when they have the right tools
• Developers are motivated by new challenges and opportunities for innovation, leading to more inventive services and applications 

Focus on integration processes that give your business the flexibility to embrace digital transformation in ways that work for your unique business.

To achieve an optimum level of integration and enable an efficient digital transformation across your organization, consider the processes. Organizations often focus on processes when they think about how to integrate technology with their business, but fail to look at them holistically. A comprehensive, holistic approach involves having a single point of reference for understanding how processes are used throughout the company, so that everyone can make decisions based on those same standards. For example, if different teams or departments within an organization use different versions of a process, and each follows its own unique set of steps when completing tasks, then chances are high that there will be inconsistencies in the way projects are delivered across teams and departments. These inconsistencies can result in delays and errors, as well as lead to a negative impact on quality because a standardized, consistent method was not implemented in all units involved in completing certain activities. These activities are usually driven by processing requests made by the clients and customers who use our services.

Orchestrating integration processes across your data sources, on-premises APIs and cloud services

Many IT teams face the same challenge: they have to integrate with a wide range of systems and data sources, both inside and outside their organizations. And it’s only getting more complex as most businesses have adopted hybrid cloud architectures.

Smart DIH provides software that makes real time data integration (and data integration as a service) easier by providing a single platform to manage all your applications in one place. The platform also gives you control over where and how each application runs—on-premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid or multi-cloud configuration. Smart DIH empowers your IT department with the technology that can help you serve customers better than ever before:

• It’s easy to use and manage, so it doesn’t require a lot of training or maintenance
• With the ability to scale up, you can meet increasing demand at peak times without having to worry about running out of capacity
• You’ll be able to deliver more applications faster than ever before: from full-stack (web front end, database service tier and application engine) through container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes (and Kubernetes as a Service) for easy scaling across multiple servers in seconds when needed regardless of whether those are physical machines or virtual machines (VMs)

An Operational Data Hub such as Smart DIH connects all data sources, on-premises APIs, and cloud services into one place. This Hub allows you to quickly integrate applications and devices, while achieving resiliency and availability through virtualized integration outside your core systems.