iPaaS vs Middleware – Royal Cyber Perspective

Written by Ali Akthar

Technical Account Manager

Due to the COVID -19 impact, Banking and other Businesses are shrinking their margins to survive in such a competitive landscape. Therefore, the only way to survive is by cutting operational costs & expenses and make it more streamlined, agile, and focused on the actual core business.

This has brought many organizations to a point where they opt for cloud-based offerings that are typically subscriptions based and without involving infrastructure cost. When cloud applications need integration with existing applications on the ground, they would need solutions like IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), which can cater to all the organization's integration need whether the applications are on the cloud or the ground.

Why Middleware Use to be the Solution Earlier

Banks and many other businesses started getting the feed from multiple third-party systems (few in numbers) internally as well as externally, and to overcome the integration (handshaking), security, and reliability, middleware technology was put in place. Middleware was one solution that could integrate applications, databases, different protocols, or even legacy applications. Middleware was used in a tightly controlled environment where applications and data were centrally located and managed. Usually, an Architecture term referred to as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was popular where all the applications were tightly coupled and mostly available behind the firewall.

Middleware was designed to support enterprise integrations having multiple protocols such as file-based protocols, ISO-based protocols, etc. protocol conversions, data transformation, and routing capabilities. Another aspect of Middleware requires highly skilled resources to write the code and test each integration, which could take months or even years as these integrations are complex and time-consuming.

What Changed Since Then?

The entire IT and business landscape has changed, there are cloud apps, there are many fintech players in the market with innovative ideas, business demands are frequently changing, and there has been a shift in the technological architecture, Open Banking, Open API concept, Cloud or Hybrid deployments, etc. To meet this growing demand, Middleware turns out to be an expensive, time consuming and resource hungry project.

How IPaaS Solves this Equation

Integration Platform as a service is a cloud-based multi-tenant platform that supports cloud to cloud, cloud to on-premises and on-premises to on-premises application and integrations. IPaaS is a single, unified platform that helps with application and data integrations; IPaaS helps boost developer productivity by requiring no hard coding, no schema enforcement, and rapid development via a robust designer interface. IPaaS also provides self-service integration capabilities for different job roles such as Business Analysts, Data Scientists, and non-developers. IPaaS eliminates the effort and maintenance involved with traditional ETL tools and removes data silos so the organizations can connect faster. IPaaS provides time to value, the ability to handle most complex cloud to cloud and cloud to on-prem use cases, provides developers easy development capabilities and a lot of self-service capabilities. IPaaS also has the out of the box built-in connectors to streamline the application integration capabilities.

This brings the entire change for organizations to adopt cloud-ready technologies. Banking applications, ERP systems, CRM tools, Communication tools, Project Management tools, Time and Attendance systems, Web-based applications, and many others are cloud-ready apps available on a subscription basis and run-on cloud infrastructure. Apart from that, Infrastructure as service is also a popular medium to place the on-ground applications, which concludes that IPaaS can solve the problem of every organization and is a cost-effective solution.

Real-Life Customer Challenge & How Royal Cyber Solved it

A leading financial institution using Enterprise Service Bus faced a challenge to connect salesforce applications, CRM applications, Core Banking (On-Premises Application) & SAP system (On-Premises). Royal Cyber proposed an IPaaS solution that enabled the unification of multiple endpoints on a single platform, liberating users to extract valuable insights in running the business quickly. This helped the financial institution make data-driven decisions quickly and provide accurate predictability to generate more revenue from this.

Criteria to Determine the Integration Strategy

To address the issues of a growing IT landscape and carry out a hybrid IT integration strategy, use the following criteria:

Take inventory of your cloud services requirements and cloud applications previously implemented across your organization to establish ways that IT and the business can benefit from having centralized infrastructure through integration. Evaluate if your existing integration strategy can address the growing needs of hybrid IT with the Royal Cyber team of experts. For more information, you can email us at info@royalcyber.com or visit www.royalcyber.com.

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