In the digital age, any business is generating vast amounts of data. From KPIs to customer satisfaction: if you’re not using that data effectively, it’s going to waste. Whether setting up a marketing tech stack or implementing your cloud-based PBX system, data integration allows you to seamlessly collate all the data that matters to your business.
But it’s only easy with the right tools. When all your data is spread out in different products in different categories, with no native integration, it’s not obvious how you can pull that information without a lot of manual copy-pasting.
That’s where Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) comes in.
What is IPaaS?
IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is a cloud solution that enables organizations to integrate multiple application data sources into one place easily. This makes it easier to share data and applications between different teams and the software solutions they use. IPaaS allows teams to quickly build, deploy, and manage automated data flows while requiring little coding.
What is data integration?
Data integration is the process of combining data from multiple sources into a single, unified view. That involves pulling the raw data in from many sources and arranging it into one consistent format. If you have a phone system in the cloud, you can pull data like sentiment analysis from customer calls into a broader view of customer feeling taken from social media comments, marketing data, your CRM, etc.
Data integration enables organizations to improve the quality of analytics and insights: they have more information to work from, and they have a better sense of how different departments are working together. Giving them a holistic view of their business helps them improve efficiency and reduce costs across the whole company.
Five ways IPaaS makes data integration easy
With the above in mind, let’s cover the five ways IPaaS makes data integration easy for any company.
Communication and Collaboration
IPaaS improves communication and collaboration in data integration by providing one unified platform for applications and systems to connect and exchange data. The alternative is a patchwork of bespoke scripts and brittle automation that could break easily when one product changes.
The platform simplifies the development and maintenance of integrations, reducing complexity and enabling teams to build and deploy automated data flows quickly. By making all of this easy and visible in one place, it makes the whole system easier to think about, discuss, and collaborate on.
No-code workflow
IPaaS allows staff to create and deploy integration processes and data flows without needing to write any code if they don’t want to. This enables non-technical team members like Sales and Marketing staff to manage their own data, reducing the need for hiring expensive developers or occupying the busy developers on staff.
By making those processes easy to alter and maintain, IPaaS enables teams to keep their data flows secure and up-to-date. They can reformat the data to get new insights and amend data flows when one of the third-party products involves changes.
More efficiency
IPaaS makes data integration more efficient by making processes more straightforward. Through IPaaS, teams can quickly and easily share data between systems. Without it, you’d need to be formatting and emailing large spreadsheets across the company, and having several copies of the sheet floating around could quickly get confusing.
IPaaS can even make it possible to run real-time reporting from a single source of truth, so teams can easily see metrics like customer sentiment or sales ROI and respond in real-time.
A single solution with centralized management
If you have some good software developers on the team, it’s not very hard to join up the services you use with bespoke scripts and services.
But as the team grows, the entire company will rely on those developers to keep all of those scripts up to date with dozens of ever-changing products and services. As employees turnover, it could become hard to even find the script you need to alter.
IPaaS makes it easy for anyone in the team to manage data and services, and because it’s all in one place, you can add as many services as you need with no risk of losing track of them.
Scale
IPaaS makes data integration possible at scale. If you have many tools or a few tools in use by many individuals, it’s impossible to maintain integrations manually. To make it easy to manage so many data sources, you need them all on a single system. IPaaS makes it easy to make a change once it alters as many data flows as you need.
IPaaS data integration at scale
Data integration at the scale of a large company would be impossible without some kind of unified platform. IPaaS makes it easy for anyone to build and maintain data flows across disparate data sources and collaborate with other teams to make them even more effective.
