There are many reasons for an organization to modernize its IT infrastructure. Modernizing your environment enables you to become more agile, flexible, and scalable, and it also saves money, both short and long run.
As your business scales, you would like new software programs to assist you to retain track of information, performance, and customers. One of the primary steps an enterprise must complete to modernize its infrastructure revolves around IT system integration.
WHAT IS SYSTEM INTEGRATION?
With regards to software solutions, system integration is often defined as the process of linking together various IT systems, services, and/or software to enable all of them to work functionally and cohesively in an exceedingly coordinated and unified manner. to put it simply, the procedure connects multiple separate components that frequently come from different vendors to work together.
There are scattered pieces of an organization’s information subsystems that require them to fit together into one well-coordinated, cohesive architecture or integrated application mesh. Systems integration could be a great solution for companies who struggle with performing on multiple independent subsystems and are experiencing plenty of your time being wasted because of re-entering data to every one of the tools manually. It’s a complex building process that connects an organization’s functions from varying systems, streamlining disparate systems, including existing hardware, software (customized or out-of-box), and communications. It ensures that every integrated subsystem functions as needed. In short, system integration is like putting a puzzle together.
BENEFITS OF IT SYSTEM INTEGRATION
Once a company makes the commitment to go forward with modernized integration of its environment, the advantages that it gains are wide-ranging. a number of the advantages of IT systems integration for the enterprise:
1. Simplicity
Through an integrated infrastructure, the complexities of various business processes and applications are gone, instead replaced by a simple-to-use, unified environment. An integrated architecture is intuitive and allows changes to be made from one screen, wherever the employee is located.
2. Save Money
With the choice to manage all of your data and applications from one platform, costs are going to be greatly reduced.
3. Security
One system means an enterprise doesn’t have to secure various systems individually, each with varying levels of success and risk when it comes to protecting your data. An integrated system allows organizations to more easily build the required security tools to stop unauthorized access and better meet compliance mandates.
4. Real-time visibility
An integrated architecture enables an enterprise to create better, educated business decisions because it has access to its data in real-time. Now, enterprises can track their data throughout its lifecycle from start to end. Companies can access their data at any time and remain well informed with up-to-date information available from anywhere.
5. Efficiency
Employees can become more efficient and productive with an integrated and modernized environment. Rather than entering data manually, structured, formatted data can hop throughout the enterprise ecosystem via automation, allowing employees to spend their time on more productive projects.
SI METHODS:
- Horizontal Integration: Involves the creation of a singular subsystem that’s meant to be the only interface between all other subsystems, ensuring that there’s just one interface between any subsystem and any could also be replaced with another without affecting the others by using totally different data and interfaces. this is often also called an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
- Vertical Integration: Subsystems are integrated according to functionality by creating “silos” of functional entities, beginning with the lowest basic function upward (vertical). This very quick method only involves a couple of vendors and developers but becomes costlier over time because to implement new functionalities, new silos must be created.
- Star Integration: Also referred to as “Spaghetti Integration” because each subsystem is connected to multiple subsystems so the diagrams of the interconnections appear as if a star. However, the more subsystems there are, the more connections are made, and it finishes up looking like spaghetti.
- Common Data Format: Helps the system avoid having the adapter convert to and from every application format. Systems using this method set a common or application-independent format, or they supply a service that does the transformation to or from one application into the common application.
- Point-to-Point Integration: during a point-to-point integration (or point-to-point connection) there are only two system components involved. However, while it lacks the complexity of “true” system integration, it still connects a system to a different system for them to function together. Typically, such point-to-point integration handles just one function and doesn’t involve any complex business logic. Many cloud-based applications offer these kinds of point-to-point integrations as productized, “out of the box” integration modules for the most common IT systems.
SIX-STEP SYSTEM INTEGRATION PROCESS
Boosting productivity and improving the workflow of your company is important if your aim is to succeed. Systems integration is a good way to attain these goals. so as to try and do so, they typically split their work into 6 equally important phases and these are:
1. Requirements gathering
In general, the primary step consists of one or more meetings once you share your ideas and requirements with a systems integrator. it’s crucial that you simply know exactly what you and your team expect the future system and its components to do.
2. Analysis
After your expectations and specifications for your future software are listed down, business analysts conduct a radical analysis so as to see operational feasibility.
3. Architecture design
Thanks to the analysis, a systems integrator is prepared to perform the process of putting your subsystems together. Usually, blueprints of the integration are created to assist each side to envision the method.
4. Systems integration design
This is the longest and therefore the most challenging phase of the process where the particular integration is performed. If all of the previous steps are followed with close attention to detail, a systems integrator should perform systems integration successfully and simply, without losing valuable data.
5. Implementation
Once the system is prepared, it’s verified and tested. Only then your order goes live so you and your employees can start enjoying it.
6. Maintenance
The competitive advantage of getting your subsystems integrated by an expert company over buying a replacement off-the-shelf solution is that a systems integrator makes sure your product works flawlessly even after it’s released.
For the last decade, the aggregation of various component systems or subsystems that cooperate to deliver an entire functionality has been the main focus of industries that use technology. At the end of the day, for an enterprise to become a digital business, it must recognize that it has to leverage the capabilities of more modern IT systems.
The main reason for organizations to use system integration is their need to improve productivity and also the quality of their operations. The goal is to urge the organization’s various IT systems to “talk to each other” through the combination, to speed up information flows and reduce operational costs for the organization. System integration isn’t used only to attach an organization’s internal systems, but also third parties that the organization operates with.