8 Use Cases for Cloud Integration Hub, a Critical Component of iPaaS

Organizations today are experimenting and innovating to stay competitive. Integration leaders and architects are looking for ways to successfully operationalize those innovations. And fit them into their IT landscape. New use cases and patterns continue to emerge. Those need to be evaluated and teamed with the right cloud integration hub solution. This will deliver better business value.

Increasingly, companies are investing in and implementing an enterprise integration platform as a service (iPaaS). A next-gen, enterprise iPaaS provides all the capabilities you need on one platform. This includes API management, an integration hub, and application and data integration solutions. And an iPaaS enables you to use the right combination of integration tools for each unique use case. A cloud integration hub is a core component of iPaaS. In this post, I’d like to highlight eight use cases that would benefit from a cloud integration hub.

What Is a Cloud Integration Hub?

An integration hub connects with enterprise data sources and applications. It uses a hub-and-spoke model. This is where the source and target applications do not talk to each other; they talk through the hub.

It streamlines connectivity within your environment and enables the reuse of data. Advanced integration hubs like Informatica Cloud Integration Hub (CIH) deploy a resilient pub-sub based architecture that leads to the standardization and democratization of data. CIH is designed to reduce costs per integration, improve IT efficiency and free up your resources so that they can help drive innovation.

8 Use Cases for Informatica Cloud Integration Hub

1. Data democratization: self-service consumption of departmental data products

Data democratization requires easy access to standardized data from a centrally accessible repository. You also need proper governance of the integrations and data flows. As your enterprise grows, you may realize it’s harder to maintain one source of truth across the company. This gives rise to newer data management frameworks like data fabric and data mesh.

How can you make data discoverable and accessible in a distributed architecture? You need to standardize processes on how to expose your data and how to consume it. Every department generates data products that can be made available through localized data integration hubs. CIH acts as a centralized hub for all data topics that the department has to offer. Through the hub, different parts of the organization can enable business users to derive insights and knowledge from their data. At the same time, they can monitor the usage and activities.

A pub-sub-based hub enables all business applications to subscribe to one cohesive, resilient and secure source of information. One that’s irrespective of the origin of the applications and how they function. CIH’s low-code/no-code self-service model of publishing and subscribing data helps identify data and integrate with the required system without involving the technical team. This brings down the cost per data integration. It also allows organizations to deliver integrations faster and more efficiently.

2. Governance of integration across systems

While you want to enable business users and increase data utilization, you also need to make sure you have visibility over each data flow. A visual representation of the relationships between publishers, topics, and subscribers—as well as lineage—helps to govern the integration landscape. CIH provides this oversight and control over each data flow as well as the entire integration landscape. This makes it easier to troubleshoot and verify that the data flow is reliable and secured. With proactive alerts and elaborate scheduling mechanisms, it becomes easier and more efficient to govern.

3. Data federation across the organization

One of the major challenges of a master data management (MDM) solution is to govern and control the data flowing in and out of it. Once the data is clean, transformed, matched and merged, the golden record is created. But without a centralized solution, proliferation of the master data becomes a challenge. For MDM, the hub acts as a point of contact, where the master data is pushed through topics that can be subscribed by any number of applications or systems. The monitoring mechanism of CIH helps to regulate the data flow in and out of MDM and issue an alert if there’s a problem.

4. Cloud and application modernization

Companies are modernizing their data integration landscape to improve internal efficiency. They’re also looking to enable data-driven innovation through cloud, analytics and AI. Manual data integration efforts often limit the ability of an organization to experiment and scale. CIH increases efficiency and supports unique and advanced use cases. This empowers business users to connect to the right data with a no-code/low-code solution.

5. Point-to-point integrations

Companies moving to digital and becoming more data-driven have an impact. More applications, systems and services will require access to the same data. With point-to-point integration frameworks, there are redundant integration tasks that drain costs and resources. With CIH’s hub-and-spoke architecture, you reduce the number of connections. You ingest data once, then distribute it to multiple destinations. Cloud synchronization costs can be controlled with the same approach. In a multi-cloud environment, you can drastically reduce API call charges and data transfer charges using CIH.

6. Integration construction

With disruptions all around, business continuity plans are gaining importance. It is critical to reduce the impact of downtime and avoid data loss and delays that occur when tightly coupled applications fail and stop communicating. Informatica’s CIH can remove the application dependency between a source and a target. This reduces points of failure and makes your integrations much more resilient.

7. Resource consumption

The hub allows you to configure different retention periods for data. This helps you to make sure subscribing applications can consume the data at any latency. It also helps to schedule the data flows in a way that minimizes resource consumption.

8. Time to market

During modernization, companies are constantly adding and replacing applications. This is a complicated process. Without a centralized system, business users don’t know which data to trust and use, which can slow down the process. These problems can be managed with CIH, which provides a single interface per application and acts as a single source of truth. For a new application, a single integration connects it with all systems through the hub — making it faster and more cost effective to manage. The hub is designed to handle new data requirements and to integrate new data sources with ease. This encourages business users to drive innovative projects.

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