Cloud | Fiorano Blog

The explosive adoption of cloud-based applications by modern enterprises has created an increased demand for cloud-centric integration platforms. The cloud poses daunting architectural challenges for integration technology like: decentralization, unlimited horizontal scalability, elasticity and automated recovery from failures. The traditional ESBs were never designed to solve these issues. Here are a few reasons why ESBs are not the best bet for cloud-based integration

Performance and Scalability
Most ESBs do simplify integration but use a hub-and-spoke model that limits scalability since the hub becomes a communication bottleneck. To scale linearly in the cloud, one requires a more federated, distributed, peer-to-peer processing approach towards integration with automated failure recovery. Traditional ESBs lack this approach.

JSON and REST
ESBs evolved when XML was the dominant data-exchange format for inter-application communication and SOAP the standard protocol for exposing web services. The world has since moved on to JSON and today, mobile and enterprise APIs are exposed using REST protocols. ESBs that are natively based on XML and SOAP are less relevant in today’s cloud-centric architecture.

Security and Governance
These are key concerns for any enterprise that chooses to move to cloud. With multiple applications in the cloud, enterprises are not always comfortable with centralized security hubs. Security and governance need to be decentralized to exploit the elasticity of the cloud. Old-guard middleware products were typically deployed within the firewall and were never architected to address the issues of decentralized security and governance.

Latency and Network connectivity
When your ESB lives in the external cloud, latency becomes a critical challenge as end-points are increasingly distributed across multiple public and private clouds. Traversing a single hub in such an environment leads to unpredictable and significant performance problems which can only be addressed with new designs built ground-up with Cloud challenges in mind.

We now live in a competitive world where competitors and peers continue to raise the bar of customer experience. Businesses are always looking to deepen engagements with their target audience but that target audience’s expectations have changed, thanks to the digital customer experience.

A common characteristic of successful businesses is the ability to adapt. Anything digital can and will be recorded, archived, analyzed, and shared. With the proliferation of digital channels, businesses are challenged to find better ways to authentically engage across channels, be it with customers, partners or even employees. To tap into new revenue growth potential, companies must adopt new customer centric practices, including offering an integrated customer experience across digital and analog channels to meet customer preferences.

Digital transformation on the customer experience level is not just a matter of the front-end and customer-facing functions; this is just part of a transformational challenge on the level of technology and processes. It’s a matter of the whole organization and requires involving back-end transformations as well. It requires an enterprise-wide approach or better, a roadmap towards such a holistic approach. Digital transformation requires a strategy with a fully integrated operating model, a technology that can rapidly and scalably provision connections with proliferating cloud, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and business partners’ APIs.

As businesses dive deep in providing the best customer experience, there is a greater need to integrate systems to cope with fast-moving phenomena, such as cloud and mobile, involving cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on premises integration. These complex connections can easily be established with a hybrid integration platform, a new way to connect cloud-based, mobile and on-premises resources. Hybrid integration platforms such as Fiorano Cloud can deal with the increasing volume, speed and variety of information that new digital channels bring, while supporting the multichannel architecture associated with mobile and other multichannel initiatives.

Here is an example of how digitization can significantly improve customer experience; Delaware North, a global leader in hospitality and food service recently revolutionized its customer experience by deploying the Fiorano platform, a digital business backplane to efficiently track individual customer venues and provide relevant Business Intelligence to their customers, also a competitive edge for Delaware North. The Business Intelligence and real-time data provided by Delaware North to its clients is critical to their marketing campaigns, allowing them to assess operational efficiency and make adjustments to improve top line revenues. The new infrastructure of customer-centric interconnected systems allows operational excellence, optimization, efficiency and opens up new areas of opportunity. Delaware North intends to steadily extend the digital business backplane across its global locations which can ready their systems for today’s highly connected and digitized economy.

Processes, data, agility, prioritization, technology, integration, information, business and IT alignment and digitization among others are all conditions for better customer experiences.

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