Managing increased enterprise complexity

Landscape complexity is not a new challenge for IT. Many organically grown enterprises have:

• Multiple core systems of record on-premise
• Legacy applications that are critical to the business but too overdeveloped to change
• Systems from acquisitions that have always had operational workarounds

As organisations strive for more streamlined operations, increased speed to market, and the ability to react to volatile business climates, the lack of flexibility from these applications has been a factor in the surge of cloud hosted or SaaS systems.

However, as the business adoption of these service based solutions, which are typically systems of innovation & differentiation, continue to increase, the need to seamlessly integrate them across the wider enterprise has never been more important to unlock data and provide a consistent employee or consumer experience.

The initial accessibility of SaaS solutions, coupled with frustrations around the speed of IT, have seen many lines of business going directly to cloud service providers. However, unless the scope of the new service is very niche or outside the core business, it can quickly become apparent that these slick looking packaged SaaS solutions still have a reliance on the existing company ecosystem. This leads back to engagement with traditional organisational delivery and often results in either the slowing of the project, or the compromise in enterprise practices and security – neither of which is a desirable outcome.

Thomas Bittman, vice-president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said: “Unless very small, most businesses will continue to have an on-premise – or hosted – datacentre capability. But with most computing power moving to IaaS providers, organisations and suppliers need to focus on managing and leveraging the hybrid combination of on-premise, off-premise, cloud and non-cloud architectures, with a focus on managing cloud-delivered capacity efficiently and effectively.”

So the challenge on how to protect the core business without hindering the speed at which innovation is required, is one facing a lot of mid-large scale enterprises.

The solution to managing this complexity is achieved with Hybrid integration and abstraction of core business services through reusable APIs or micro-services. An evolution on what SOA looked to achieve, iPaaS & API Gateway software companies are advocating legacy modernisation through API abstraction to achieve the balance between agility and resilience, between federated self-service and centralised governance and control.

By utilising the strengths of existing integration capabilities, coupled with security, governance and process orchestration layers of an API Gateway platform, organisations can enable their line of business platforms to innovate and differentiate at PACE, whilst maintaining the integrity of core business processes and data.

It is through this hybrid approach that we can embrace the new, whilst maximising the value from existing investments.

At PACE we have a number of services to help you address these challenges, whether it is getting a foundation in accelerating your API business, or enabling a multi-modal IT capability to balance teams for hybrid implementation requirements. Whether it is established on premise integration technologies or cloud & API integration platforms, PACE can provide insight into innovative ways to get value and increase agility from your existing investments through seamless business integration.