5 Laws of Data Integration in the Cloud.

In a time when data is so scattered, APIs are so very numerous, and data volumes are exploding, data integration has become essential. More than that, it has become expected

Mike Hoskins,Paige Roberts

The cloud is everywhere. It’s one of those momentous paradigmatic shifts in IT. We have to deal with it. We have to understand what it means to each and every one of us.

Sweeping generalization as it may be, we’ve observed that people in every industry, from software to healthcare, from banking to manufacturing, are either on the cloud because they built their business around hosted on-demand software, or they’re using more traditional on-premises software – but they want to take advantage of the cloud.

There are huge advantages to moving to the cloud: reduced expenses, powerful elastic computing platforms that handle peak loads, fast implementations and reduced IT needs, to name a few. Lots of businesses have been quick to grab onto that brass ring, but Gartner did a study on companies transitioning to SaaS to see how it was working. They found that some businesses were actually pulling their data back out of cloud-based applications, and asked the obvious question: why?

In the survey, Gartner asked 270 people, “Why is your organization currently transitioning from a SaaS solution to an on-premises solution?” The number one reason 56 percent of respondents gave for transitioning back to on-premises solutions was unexpectedly significant requirements of integration. That bears repeating. More than half of the people who tried moving their business to a cloud-based application and pulled back did it because integrating those applications with the rest of their business proved too challenging to make it worthwhile. This has been, since the advent of SaaS, the Achilles’ heel, the kryptonite, of cloud computing and on-demand software delivery.

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