Drive Digitization With a Data Integration Hub

Many businesses are aware they need to digitize their operations but struggle with the challenges of modernizing legacy systems that don’t share data. What is needed is an IT application architecture that can enable digitization initiatives by making the data in backend systems available via a scalable, high-performance data store and providing access to that data through APIs.  

‍

The Drive to Digitize

‍

Company executives are increasingly realizing the limitations of their legacy systems. These systems not only put limits on the ability to do useful analytics, but more seriously they hinder a business's ability to digitize, which may include migration to the cloud and onward integration.

Two key questions are:

1. How can the data in legacy backend systems be exposed so that it can be used more effectively without jeopardizing the performance of those legacy systems?
2. How can the data be consolidated and re-purposed to create business optimizations or revenue generating activities?

‍

‍Challenges of Digitizing and Consolidating Data

‍

One approach is for businesses to build their own integrations, but this raises its own major challenges:

• The skills needed to extract data from different systems, using different protocols and formats, are in short supply and are costly to acquire.
• Investing in a solution, such as a data warehouse or data lake, where extracted data can be stored requires additional technological skills and is costly to run and maintain. Then there is also the issue of how to secure, fully gain ownership, and control data stored in these data repositories. 
• An API service layer can make the consolidated data available, but APIs standards are diversifying, and the technology is continuing to evolve.
• The approach to using APIs in this way involves an architectural approach that many API developers are not familiar with.  

Organizations that choose the ‘build it’ route find that they need three separate teams focusing on data extraction, data warehousing, and API building. Because of the different issues of each area, the teams end up working separately on separate tools, rather than together as a cohesive unit to deliver the overall system.

‍

‍What is a Data Integration Hub

‍

A Data Integration Hub (DIH) is a central mediation point between various data sources and data consumers.
‍

It is a single platform that unites ETL, Integration, API Management, and Warehousing, that allows organizations to consolidate, manipulate and orchestrate data. With a data hub, businesses receive the means to structure and harmonize data collected from various sources. Gartner describes this as a Digital Integration Hub, but rather than it being a concept, Synatic acts as a hub for an organization's full solution stack.
‍

A DIH has four elements:

1. Extracts and aggregates data from multiple back-end applications
2. Loads that data into a data store which is scalable and provides high performance
3. Enables unified access to all of the data in the data store via an API layer
4. Integrates the stored data on to additional systems where needed

By doing this, the DIH decouples the legacy systems from the action of accessing the data. It enables the legacy systems to run unhindered whilst opening up the possibility to use the data for modern applications and services, thereby supporting cloud migrations.  

1. Extracting Data: The DIH has tools to access data from a variety of sources and locations and avoids the need for high-cost custom coding.
2. Data Store: The data store helps to manage large volumes of structured and unstructured data, supports large-volume, complex data workloads, and ensures data security. It is also a means of storing data sets that grow over time and ensuring that the data is always available on demand.
3. API Layer: The API layer provides open, responsive, controlled access to data in the data store without imposing a workload on the legacy systems and enables any kind of analysis or further processing of the data.

‍

Benefits of a DIH

‍

Investing in a DIH solution brings several benefits:

• Provides an event-based integration environment that delivers data to the required systems, allowing them to react in real-time  
• Allows access to data across sites and regions in real-time
• Enables new applications and services to be deployed quickly and efficiently
• Through modern API management, applications can support higher user concurrency
• Security and governance of all elements are managed at a single point
• Can scale to handle peak data volumes
• Only needs one team to support it

Synatic offers all the elements of a Data Integration Hub: ‍

• As a Hybrid Integration Platform: Synatic provides on-premise and cloud-based integration capabilities to support a wide range of integration use cases.
• As a Data Store: Synatic has a built-in MongoDB data store into which any size and any type of data can be loaded and saved.
• As API Layer: Synatic has a full lifecycle API management platform.

‍

‍Data Integration Hub

During implementation, Synatic’s Software-with-a-Service assists with the expertise needed to tackle complex and sometimes unfamiliar architectural, data management, and technical challenges. ‍

‍

‍‍Synatic DIH Drives Application Modernization

‍

Implementing the Synatic DIH solution enables an organization to modernize legacy systems by using a platform to consolidate, aggregate and orchestrate the data. It maintains the compatibility of existing infrastructure with new and cloud-based architectures, and ensures that legacy systems are not overloaded by the requirements of new systems and services. Data is offloaded from backend systems and stored in a scalable, high-performance, low-latency data store. API management ensures responsive and reliable APIs that deliver information that can be used in new applications and services.

For more information on how you can leverage the Synatic DIH solution, contact us today.