Hybrid Cloud Integration

While the cloud is undoubtedly the future of IT and innovation, the transition won't happen overnight and will probably never be full. Replacing legacy systems is a long process and some data is simply better off on-premises. Yet a proper strategy is still needed to connect various environments to ensure high operability, efficient information exchange, and smooth operations. This is where the hybrid cloud approach comes into play. And in the context of hybrid integration it means that a reliable data synchronization needs to be ensured between all elements of a company's hybrid cloud architecture.

First things first – what is hybrid cloud architecture? To put it simply, it is a mixture of on- and off-premises environments. Now, sometimes you'd find that a private cloud is equated with on-premises, but this is not entirely correct. A private cloud is a cloud dedicated solely to one business entity or one organization; however, it can be hosted on- as well as off-premises. So, for the sake of our question, it would be more correct to say that hybrid cloud architecture encompasses various cloud environments (public and private) and traditional data center infrastructure.

As for the hybrid integration architecture, now that we established what hybrid cloud "consists" of, it's easy to see that when it comes to hybrid integration, it's basically the same concept. The whole point of various environments being connected is that data can move freely between them. In reality, though, you must also factor in not only your own environments, but also partners environments, too. This is why you need to outline a proper hybrid integration strategy right from the start.

Short answer: with a mix of tools and strategies that create a reliable and secure data flow between on-prem and clouds – whether local, dedicated, or public. These can include: interaction, partner and/or system APIs; a secure gateway to connect to your local environment (elastic.io uses a VPN Tunnel for this purpose); a B2B gateway to simplify EDI (electronic data interchange) handling; a versatile validation strategy that will span over access tokens, application IDs and various authentication methods.

There are so many solutions and products on the market that support hybrid cloud integration efforts: IBM, Talend, WSO2 are just a (very) few examples. So, how do you evaluate a hybrid integration solution and what capabilities are must-have?

Let's consider briefly, what such a solution must be able to do on a technical level: As stated above, it needs to provide a secure gateway (such as our VPN Agent) to enable data flow between the local environment and the cloud. It should support a variety of protocols such as EDI or XML for enterprise-grade use cases such as B2B or even IoT, for that matter. Obviously, you also need a variety of patterns and strategies to interconnect applications – from messaging to process orchestration (and, of course, APIs). Ideally, you'll have pre-built connectors for mainstream service and applications stack for low- or no-code integration as well as ways to build API-led connectivity for REST and SOAP for home-grown services and apps. Last but not least, to limit the amount of point-to-point integrations, you'll need a pub/sub architecture to enable systems to respond to events in near real-time and with low latency.

As for the usability aspect, ideally, a hybrid integration platform should provide as much standardization and automation as possible, with drag-n-drops, intuitive mapping, and user-friendly interface. Even though it is not to expect that line-of-business employees will take part in the process (as much as some experts want us to convince), the benefits of a low-code hybrid integration platform should not be reserved to only a handful of specifically trained IT specialists but ideally, to any IT department member, regardless of their skill level.