What is a cloud service?
A cloud service provides computing resources over the internet on-demand. Common types of cloud services include Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The advantages of cloud services include self-provisioning and elasticity; customers can provide themselves services on an on-demand basis — ending the need to pay for resources that will go unused — and discontinue them when they are no longer necessary. Cloud services are usually paid for via a subscription rather than buying the services up front, adding additional flexibility.
Cloud services are becoming an increasingly important part of the enterprise technology stack, but it is becoming ever more critical to integrate services in the cloud with on-premises and legacy systems. This is because there is a strong business imperative to modernize older legacy systems to support modern business and technology needs like the creation of personalized customer journeys and mobile initiatives, as well as business process management. A very common instance of this is integrating customer data stored in an on-premises database into a cloud-based CRM like Salesforce. To do this, an application infrastructure is needed that can accommodate applications deployed wherever they are, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
This could be accomplished with point-to-point, custom-coded integrations, but the increasing number of applications that need to be integrated combined with most companies’ investment in hybrid infrastructure (i.e. a mixture of deployment in on-premises and multiple cloud environments) means that a large number of point-to-point integrations could become overly complex and difficult to maintain.
To solve this problem, companies are using Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS). iPaaS is a platform for building and deploying integrations both within the cloud and between the cloud services and on-premises systems. With iPaaS, users can develop integration flows that connect applications residing in the cloud or on-premises, and then deploy them without installing or managing any hardware or middleware. This enables connectivity to SaaS and cloud services and provides a secure method of accessing on-premises applications behind a firewall. In addition, an iPaaS can solve the problem of cloud silos by providing businesses a way to integrate cloud-based services with each other as well as with on-premises enterprise applications in a hybrid integration model.
As cloud services become increasingly common in business technology, integrating them with each other and existing systems will become ever more important. CloudHub, the iPaaS component of Anypoint Platform, provides a fully-managed, multi-tenanted, globally available, secure and highly available cloud platform for integration and APIs. Through the Mule runtime manager, also part of Anypoint Platform, CloudHub allows you to deploy sophisticated cross-cloud integration applications in the cloud, create new APIs on top of existing data sources, integrate on-premises applications with cloud services and much more.
Take a look at more information about how CloudHub can help you optimize the cloud services in use at your company. Also, take a look at Gartner’s report on enterprise integration and find out what makes Anypoint Platform a Leader in this software category.