How PaaS Abstracts Connectivity and Integration

No application or business service lives in isolation — whether you’re talking about a cloud or an on-premises data center. In reality, applications have to communicate and exchange data. The data must be secured throughout all lifecycle stages and accurately mapped between services as needed. To ensure consistent and accurate data across the hybrid cloud, these applications and related services must perform and act as a single integrated environment.

Connecting these applications can be particularly challenging when you consider the various integration scenarios that may occur in cloud environments. First, the PaaS platform residing in a hybrid world has to contend with a variety of applications with complex interfaces that the IT organization has no control over and little visibility into. In addition, even SaaS applications with well-defined interfaces may reside on a variety of different cloud environments. For example, many CRM systems have their own dedicated PaaS environment. Other cloud applications are built as ad hoc projects and aren’t designed to work well with other environments. From a process and data integration standpoint, all these various environments need to interact with key systems of record such as general ledger or human resources systems.

PaaS must be architected so that it can handle many unanticipated or complicated business situations.

PaaS integration services generally include connectors, adaptors, and templates for integrating applications in cloud environments. These integration services need to cover various integration scenarios, including the following:

Connectivity to clouds: An enterprise ERP system managed in the internal data center needs to integrate with a SaaS customer-relationship management system to ensure that customer sales data is synchronized across these environments.

Connectivity between clouds: An application running in an enterprise private cloud environment needs to integrate with a public cloud to increase the compute power available to the application.

Connectivity in clouds: Multiple SaaS applications need to integrate to ensure data consistency and reliability.

The value of PaaS services for integration is that it’s possible to have a secure, consistent, and standardized way to manage the interaction and delivery of a variety of software components needed for cloud integration. The concept behind a PaaS platform is that the complexity of these integration services is hidden from the team that is developing and deploying the applications.