Data drives businesses, fueling decision-making and efficiency. However, as companies expand their digital footprint, managing an increasing number of applications and data sources becomes a challenge. These challenges tend to be complex in nature, and in turn, that can create data silos.
The solution is to use technologies like data and application integration to bridge the gaps.
Read on to learn more about data integration vs. application integration and discover which is the best fit for your business.
What Is Data Integration?
Data integration is the process of combining information from diverse sources into a unified, consistent dataset that enables comprehensive analysis, enhances data quality, and supports informed decision-making across your organization. Your business information is generated and stored by many systems, from databases to apps to edge devices. Data integration takes this data, converts it into a standard format, and loads it all into one location for review. This process is called ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load). The process involves the following steps:
- Data extraction: Involves retrieving data from the different sources where it has been stored, such as databases, files, APIs, or software.
- Data transformation: Algorithms clean extracted data and make it uniform. This addresses inconsistencies, errors and adds useful details. For example, names, addresses, and dates are combined into a single structure for easy analysis.
- Data loading: After transformation, the data moves to a target such as a data warehouse, data lake, or operational data store. This brings all of your information together in one resource.
- Data quality management: Involves checks that validate, clean, and eliminate duplicate data.
- Metadata management: Involves documenting and organizing information about data, including its origin, meaning, and processing history, to enable better understanding, governance, and use of data assets.
The Importance of Data Integration
Businesses often struggle to analyze and leverage data effectively due to its fragmentation across various sources and departments. Data integration solves this problem by consolidating information from disparate systems. This process is crucial for several reasons:
- Enhances data-driven insights: Integrating data eliminates data silos and allows you to gain a complete 360-degree view of your customers, products, operations, and more from one platform. This comprehensive overview enables accurate analysis and effective decision-making.
- Improves data quality: The data transformation process minimizes inconsistencies, errors, and gaps, enhancing the reliability of the combined data that’s used for strategic planning.
- Enhances operational efficiency: Integration provides a single point of reference for shared data, avoiding duplication of information across systems. This streamlines operations and cuts down on the time and resources spent managing distributed and siloed data.
- Boosts regulatory compliance: With all business and operations information in one central place, meeting industry and data protection regulations is simple and straightforward.
What Are the Challenges of Data Integration?
Implementing data integration of legacy systems requires addressing technical challenges, ensuring security and governance, efficiently managing large volumes, and coordinating effectively between business and IT teams. Let’s take a look at these concerns in more detail:
- Data quality issues: Integrating data from legacy systems requires overcoming problems such as incompatible formats, missing data elements, and duplicate entries that require cleaning.
- Legacy system integration: Older databases and applications were not built with modern integration standards in mind. Configuring these legacy assets to share data seamlessly adds complexity.
- Data security and governance: Integrating different data sources calls for stringent security protocols and oversight of access. Effective policies and tools are needed to safeguard sensitive customer information.
- Performance and scalability: The volume of data in even a medium-sized enterprise can be substantial. Your technical solution must be able to efficiently handle your current and future loads without disrupting workflows.
- Change management: Successful integration depends upon careful coordination between business and IT teams. Changes to integrated systems or processes must be meticulously planned, and their impact should be assessed to protect against issues.
What Is Application Integration?
Application integration is the process of connecting and synchronizing different software applications to enable effective data exchange, workflow automation, and improved operational efficiency across various business systems.
The main goal of application integration is to create a unified environment where all applications can interact and work together as a single integrated system. The most critical components of application integration are:
- Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): These allow your applications to talk to each other programmatically. The APIs provide a standardized interface for applications to make requests and exchange data.
- Data mapping and transformation: This involves aligning the data structures used by different applications to ensure compatibility and consistency when sharing information.
- Messaging and communication protocols: Standards like HTTP, SOAP, and messaging queues provide a common language for interaction and allow applications to send messages and exchange data with one another. Workflow and process automation: Business processes spanning multiple applications are defined and automated through integration. This guarantees smooth, efficient execution across all related applications.
- Integration platforms: Centralized middleware solutions manage and orchestrate application integration. They provide a hub for monitoring, maintaining, and governing integrations between different systems.
Why Is Application Integration Important?
Application integration ensures you can harness the full value from the various software applications your team uses every day. Here are the main ways it can benefit your business:
- Optimizes operational efficiency: Integrating applications eliminates manual data entry and reduces duplicate work. For example, your employees can access and share information across CRM, ERP, and HR software tools.
- Enhances data accessibility: A connected technology ecosystem provides a single entry point for accessing all application data. This makes it simpler for employees and managers to find the information they need when they need it.
- Improves customer experience: With an integrated suite, your customer service team has a complete view of client profiles, orders, and correspondence history at their fingertips, improving issue resolution times.
- Increases agility and scalability: As your business grows, adding new systems is simple with integration already in place. The infrastructure can adapt quickly to changing needs.
- Provides competitive advantages: Optimizing workflows through application connectivity makes your operations run more smoothly, giving your business an edge over others.
Dropbox’s integration of Boomi resulted in an agile architecture, enhanced innovation, and streamlined data management. It improved data accessibility, accelerated the digital transformation of Dropbox’s HR operations, and reduced integration time from months and weeks to days.
What Are the Challenges of Application Integration?
Application integration challenges include project complexity, data compatibility issues, security and governance concerns, performance and scalability demands, potential vendor lock-in, and the need for effective change management across diverse systems. Here’s a more in-depth breakdown of these potential obstacles:
- Project complexity: Connecting diverse applications with different technologies, protocols, and data models requires expert skills and long working hours.
- Data compatibility: Applications may use incompatible data formats, definitions, and structures. Resolving these inconsistencies during mapping takes a lot of configuration.
- Security and governance: Integrating various tools that expose different data sets requires strong controls to avoid breaches. Policies are essential for access management and auditing.
- Performance and scalability: The volume of data exchanged and processed during integration can strain systems. Your solutions must efficiently scale with growing transaction loads.
- Vendor lock-in: Dependence on a single integration vendor may limit your ability to switch to better alternatives in the future.
- Change management: Coordinating updates accurately across integrated systems demands clear communication between business and IT teams.
Data Integration vs. Application Integration
While data and application integration involve bringing together information from different sources, their main goals and approaches differ. Let’s explore the key differences:
- Scope: Data integration consolidates data regardless of where it resides, such as databases, files, and systems. Whereas application integration connects specific applications and systems within your business.
- Purpose: Data integration focuses on creating a single source of truth from all data sources and making it available for analysis. Application integration enables interoperability between applications to support core business processes.
- Data handling: Data integration extracts, transforms, and loads data into a target system using an ETL process, while application integration moves data in its native format in real-time by establishing connections between applications.
- Integration patterns: Data integration follows the extract, transform, and load pattern(ETL) to batch process and move data. Application integration uses patterns such as API integration and messaging to allow on-demand, real-time data sharing between systems.
- Complexity: Setting up application integrations tends to be more complex since it requires coordinating communication between multiple applications and systems simultaneously.
Why You Need Both Data Integration and Application Integration
While data integration provides the foundation for connecting your various data sources, it is also essential for your business to integrate applications. Combining the two unlocks more significant benefits. If integrating both of these sounds difficult for your team, there are integration partners out there who can help implement these solutions. Here are the primary reasons why your business needs to implement both types of integration:
- Holistic data management: Data integration alone may not be sufficient to effectively employ integrated data across the systems and applications that run your core business functions.
- End-to-end process automation: You likely have complex workflows spanning multiple tools and databases. Using both data and application integration allows seamless automation of entire processes from start to finish across all relevant systems.
- Real-time data access: Integrating data sources with applications ensures everyone on your team can access the latest information in real-time. This permits reacting swiftly to changing market conditions based on up-to-date insights.
- Improved decision-making: Your managers will benefit most from both a 360-degree customer view and a complete view of vital business information, enabling them to determine the best paths forward.
- Scalability and flexibility: You can smoothly incorporate new data sources or applications without disrupting present workflows, facilitating the ongoing evolution of your business operations.
- Reduced redundancy and increased efficiency: By uniting data and application integration, data silos and manual data entry are reduced or eliminated. Processes across your organization are streamlined to boost efficiency and cost savings.
Why Boomi Is the Best Solution for Combining Data Integration and Application Integration
Integrating your disparate systems and providing all teams with access to critical business information can yield significant benefits, including increased operational efficiency, a comprehensive customer view, and improved decision-making capabilities.
To achieve this integration, consider implementing an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution, such as the Boomi Enterprise Platform.
Boomi’s iPaaS can take care of all your data and application integration needs seamlessly and enables you to construct and manage integrations across hybrid IT environments from a single, centralized console.
The key features of the Boomi Enterprise Platform include:
- Pre-built connectors: Our platform provides pre-built connectors to hundreds of popular systems so you can easily integrate your existing and new applications.
- Event-driven architecture: Boomi uses an event-driven design that allows real-time data exchange between connected systems for immediate access to information.
- Scalability: Our platform scales to handle increasing integration needs as your business grows, so you always have capacity.
- Governance and security: Boomi offers governance, auditing, and security controls to manage access and ensure compliant data integration.
- Ongoing support: You benefit from expert support, training, and resources to accelerate your integration initiatives.
Learn more about integrating systems, data, and people faster while responding quickly to unexpected changes by downloading our ebook, “Connecting a Fragmented Digital Landscape Through Modern Integration.”