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What You Need to Know About an iPaaS Solution

1. iPaaS stands for "integration platform as a service." 

2. iPaaS solutions help businesses integrate applications across environments, including CRMs, ERPs, on-site data sources, and cloud applications. 

3. Guided integration processes improve accessibility, consistency, and efficiency.

4. By outsourcing data integration, IT teams save time and money. 

5. Businesses need an iPaaS solution to streamline processes. 

With a host of benefits to offer, many businesses are ready to jump in headfirst, but it's important to plan things out to ensure you can avoid and overcome key IPaaS integration challenges that you may face across different systems and business processes. Here's more information about iPaaS solutions, including three ways they can support digital transformation and help grow your business. 

What Is an iPaaS Solution?

An integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution is a set of tools that help businesses integrate applications across environments and formats. While some companies have the resources to handle this integration themselves, an iPaaS solution is often able to handle things more efficiently while bringing in new features (like hands-on support) to ensure the solution is effective and affordable for the business.

One of the biggest uses of an iPaaS solution is integrating multiple data sources, including legacy applications, on-premise data, and the use of public/private cloud environments, into one. Not only does this help eliminate silos and build a connected ecosystem, but this cross-environment integration provides businesses with consistency, accessibility, and a more streamlined workflow. 

In addition to seamless cloud integration, the best iPaaS provider will offer your business the following: 

  • Support for all of your applications, including legacy applications that are hosted on-premises, allowing real-time data access while being a low-code solution.
  • Pre-built integration tools and data connections that allow your business to quickly bring your applications into one pipeline
  • Tools to help you create custom APIs and connectors to bring everything together.
  • Assistance with extract, transform, load (ETL) processes for cleaning and processing data. Integrate.io even offers reverse ETL capability.
  • Security features to help you encrypt data, control access, and adhere to policies and standards (i.e., SSO authentication). 
  • Performance monitoring tools, like those from Integrate.io, can identify problem areas like failing apps or where resources are over/underutilized. 
  • Integrated services, like a change data capture (CDC) solution, can provide speed, agility, and competitive advantage. Integrate.io is a very fast CDC platform that's ideal for e-commerce businesses. 

As you can imagine, filling this role can be a tall order, which is why businesses must take the time to understand how iPaaS works, what is expected on their end, and how to find the right solution for their needs. 

How Does an iPaaS Solution Work?

Like other SaaS applications, iPaaS providers offer a selection of tools and middleware that help businesses integrate more effectively. In other words, the service is not a done-for-you integration solution but rather hosted applications, servers, and tools that will help a business handle its own integration more efficiently. This is an important distinction, as iPaaS requires that IT professionals be available to utilize the platform and integrate to the business's requirements.

Still, by providing a package solution of hosted tools and infrastructure, iPaaS saves IT teams time. When using iPaaS, businesses don't need to source and piece together different tools, nor do they need to host and secure their own environment to facilitate the integrations. Additionally, iPaaS providers offer pre-built connections and rules that can speed up the assembly of integrations in a variety of environments.

With the efficiency that the right iPaaS solution can bring to the table, in addition to the service and support it can provide, even large businesses that could feasibly handle integration on their own may prefer a ready-made iPaaS platform. 

Why You Need iPaaS

Many businesses begin searching for an iPaaS solution because they have limited in-house resources and/or a limited timeline. However, even large businesses can benefit from choosing an iPaaS provider to support integration efforts.

By taking a lot of the legwork and prep work out of the process, businesses are able to focus on the specifics of the integrations and functionality rather than on the underlying infrastructure. With that said, here are three reasons why your business needs iPaaS. 

#1 Simplify Your Tech Stack 

Particularly for businesses that are somewhere in between cloud services and legacy applications, iPaaS offers the opportunity to greatly simplify an organization's tech stack. By providing a virtual platform that condenses app connections and resources into one place, businesses enjoy seamless collaboration across legacy apps, on-premise apps, and any number of cloud environments. 

This simplification of underlying infrastructure can greatly reduce the burden that's placed on IT teams, while built-in monitoring tools help ensure efficient resource utilization, improved data security, and better insight. All of that equates to cost savings and increased productivity for the entire company. 

#2 Expand Without Draining Resources

One of the primary reasons businesses begin considering an iPaaS solution is because they are facing a growing set of integration requirements that will prove to be a difficult undertaking if forced to handle everything in-house. Without iPaaS, integration is expensive, time-consuming, and challenging. 

Meanwhile, iPaaS solutions unlock additional resources at an affordable price while opening the doors to expansion and agility for the future. That means iPaaS allows businesses to continue meeting integration requirements without the need for additional management or new staff — while minimally consuming existing resources. 

#3 Support Compliance, Development, and Growth Initiatives 

Choosing the right iPaaS provider will help future-proof your business without straining internal teams. For instance, these solutions shift the responsibility of security and compliance into the hands of the vendor, which will help your business stay ahead of stricter regulations without implementing expensive and rigorous internal data governance and management. 

Additionally, iPaaS provides the development team with access to tools that will support the creation of new features and apps that will seamlessly integrate with your iPaaS solution. Without that, dev teams could spend countless hours trying to integrate new apps with legacy systems or adding features that are backward-compatible. 

Meanwhile, the tools that iPaaS solutions provide combined with their real-time monitoring and observability practices create transparency and insight for the business. Combined, these things help position companies for better decision-making and sustainable growth, all while supporting agility. That's why iPaaS is all-around beneficial for operations and success. 

Partner Up and Grow Your Business

Are you excited to learn more about how data an iPaaS solution can help grow your business? Integrate.io is a new ETL platform that caters to the e-commerce industry with deep e-commerce capability. With a focus on speed, compatibility, and meaningful features, Integrate.io can help your business unlock new opportunities for growth.

If you're interested in learning more about how Integrate.io can help you succeed, schedule a demo to chat with our team.