You need an app, I need an app, everyone needs an app. But what happens when a business has many, many apps? How do they ensure that each app responds quickly, with accurate information? What happens when an app needs info from the same source as another app – at the same time? Or when an app relies on data from several systems? Chaos can reign when hundreds of apps interconnect together, all connecting simultaneously to multiple overlapping data sources.  When this happens application ecosystems can resemble a delicious meal rather than an efficient data center – it’s spaghetti! 

Getting applications to integrate efficiently and execute smoothly at all times is crucial to running a healthy business. Well implemented application integration solutions create a seamless experience between modern  web-based applications, legacy systems, and external third party products, ensuring apps can rely on data that is always fresh, available and accessible. 

Application integration defined 

Application integration is the process of enabling independently designed applications to work together, according to Gartner. This involves ensuring data consistency and orchestrating the integrated flow of multiple activities performed by disparate applications. Application integration provides a unified interface or service to access the data and functionality of independently designed applications. 

Traditional implementations used service-oriented architecture (SOA) in which different applications are integrated using a communication layer or an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) between them. Other methods can involve custom development using APIs and web services. 

Another approach is to use an iPasS (Integration Platform as a Service) solution, a cloud-based platform that is delivered as a service. It supports both cloud-based and on-premises systems, providing tools and services that facilitate application integration and data sharing between different systems. iPaaS solutions offer pre-built connectors, adapters, and integration templates, and generally includes orchestration, data transformation, routing, monitoring, and security services. iPaaS platforms reduce the development and maintenance effort, usually offering a low code or no code approach. 

Challenges with integrating applications

Organizations attempting to provide services and top customer experiences with their virtual spaghetti face issues from a number of viewpoints. 

System Complexity

It’s likely that most organizations are using a mix of cloud and on-premises applications and data sources in hybrid and multi cloud configurations, each of which may use different formats, languages, configurations etc. Connecting and enabling efficient workflows between  these moving parts is no mean feat. 

Data Integration

Data integration is sometimes confused with application integration; however, data integration involves mapping and transforming data from one system to another. This often complex process considers the various data structures, formats, and naming conventions that each source uses. The data may arrive in batches or streams, and may originate in relational databases, no-SQL databases, object stores, file systems, or message brokers. Traditionally, once the data is ingested, for example by an ETL process, it would then be loaded into a data warehouse for storage. Newer architectures such as operational data hubs use change data capture (CDC) and streaming, in addition to batch updates to provide coherent fresh data to consuming parties.   

Change Management, Maintenance and Upgrades

Integrating new applications with existing apps, or new apps with new apps usually requires modification of the current workflows and processes. In large organizations this may involve various professionals from different departments or external partners. Getting buy-in from all stakeholders to build streamlined, coordinated workflows and minimizing disruptions requires elegant teamwork in addition to the technical challenges. Once the workflows are in place, coordinating upgrades and ensuring compatibility between different versions of all the components requires careful planning and coordination. 

Security

As the number of applications grows, maintaining data security and privacy becomes more challenging. In specific industries such as healthcare or finance, the regulations are even more stringent regarding sensitive data, from GDPR, SOC2 and CCPA, or HIPAA for healthcare, among others. Appropriate secure communication protocols, access controls, and encryption must be implemented and closely monitored. and implementing strict data governance practices. 

Data Management and Transformation

Ensuring consistency and compatibility between systems requires data model definition, mappings, and transformations. For larger organizations and enterprises, these operations involve large volumes of data. Ensuring data quality and data integrity between numerous, often disparate systems requires ongoing data cleansing and transformation. This tedious process often  involves enriching the metadata so that further analysis, integration, lineage and even AI-oriented processing can take place. 

Cost and Resources

Due to the complex nature of application integration solutions, different skilled personnel, either internal or external, may be required to plan, manage and test the ecosystem. Specialists who can manage dedicated infrastructure, legacy protocols and the connections between the various systems may be required for certain aspects such as security. In addition to being complex to manage, these resources may end up being quite costly. 

Scalability and Performance

Scalability and performance are often the most difficult aspects of application integration implementations, perhaps not initially but increasingly as the number of applications increases. At scale, handling large data volumes and high concurrent user loads, while ensuring fast transaction rates becomes increasingly challenging. Growing businesses not only increase the number of users and the inherent volumes of data that they generate, they also face increased demand for new apps. Here comes the spaghetti – as each app creates one or more point-to-point integrations, the connections become more and more tangled and interconnected resulting in something professionally referred to as a “cluster sprawl”. At scale, this can turn into generalized chaos, leading to bottlenecks, high latency and data integration challenges. 

Application integration solutions

Application integration issues such as performance, scalability, data integration and complexity may even overshadow the benefits of an application integration solution, if the user experience is severely impacted. Performance is dependent upon delegated queries to backend systems, and when the number of concurrent requests rises, applications that are tightly coupled to the backend systems can hit the same systems all at once – cooking spaghetti, increasing the heat and the overall response latency. Availability can also suffer, since availability is dependent on the connection pool of the weakest link in the backend data stores.  When a caching solution is implemented, if the required data is not in the cache, the query has to go all the way back into the database, often resulting in much higher latencies. In these situations, an iPaaS platform that manages the application integration may resort to throttling or other techniques that degrade performance and availability. 

Holistic solutions 

A holistic approach can help to ensure effective API management in conjunction with high performance and availability. Although data integration and application integration are distinct processes, the border between them is beginning to blur. The drivers for this include the demand for real time data for both data and application integration, offering users accurate, up-to-date data in their apps. Also, since data integration tools already provide data to the data store, application integration can more easily take the data from the data store and move it to the apps in real time. Business analytics teams that manage data integrations, and business technology teams that manage application integrations can now join forces to provide true business value. 

How to ensure scalability and performance with application integration solutions 

Although the increased cooperation between data and application integrators is a step in the right direction, an Operational Data Hub (also known as a Digital Integration Hub) offers a more comprehensive, holistic approach. An Operational Data Hub such as Smart DIH decouples the applications from the systems of record, and augments application integration solutions with real-time replication of all data into a unified data model. Applications can then query the Hub instead of the backend systems, untangling the spaghetti and radically improving performance and scalability. With fresh, accurate data from its real-time event-based integration (CDC), queries are based on the most up-to-date information. An advanced Operational Data Hub also offers improved development, deployment and maintenance of data services and applications with complex service orchestration and low code creation of data access microservices.