Enterprise application integration remains an age-old challenge for software product and project development. The emergence of new technologies for hosting infrastructure, platform, and software across locations, including on-premise, managed, and cloud-based data centers make integration process even more demanding and complicated. The traditional application integration approaches do not meet the challenges of changing business needs and therefore, pose threats to the agility and flexibility of an organization. Application integration, if done properly with the right choice of technology and best practice considerations, can deliver an immense strategic and technical value. How an enterprise pursues application integration practices, can really make a difference between a project’s pitfall and success.
In this paper, Kovair discusses the best practices to be adopted by the stakeholders while implementing an effective application integration solution within an organization.
Know Your Goals
Defining the goals of your integra
The business drivers for integrating applications
The information available at management’s end
The existing applications and services under management
The core business processes and their dependencies
The integration scenarios, such as Application-to-Application (A2A), Business-to-Business (B2B), and Cloud-based applications (Software-as-a-Service – SaaS)
Consider the Right Integration Approach
Selecting the right integration technology is the next important step once you have set your goals. Choose an Integration Platform instead of multiple ad hoc point-to-point solutions that:
Gives you a one-stop-solution for all your integration needs
Provides fast and simple deployment options
Requires limited IT Support
Offers improved adaptability and agility
Supports Functional Reusability
Provides end-to-end traceability across toolsets and artifacts
Has an independent Change Management system
Delivers interoperability in a loosely coupled framework
Helps to orchestrate rather than just integrate tools of different functions and technology
Generates configurable reports for visual monitoring of integration success and failure
Supports both linking and syncing mechanisms along with data migration needs
Meets the needs of enterprise-class security
Supports multiple versions of the same tool or application
Can easily accommodate the future replacement of any application or addition of new applications to your application ecosystem in a plug-and-play mode
Be Aware of Technical Considerations
Before driving an application integration project, the project stakeholders need to consider and analyze the specific technical requirements for:
Semantic and Metadata Management
Validation of data for correct structure and format
Standard and Advanced Transformations
Information Consumption, Processing and Delivery
Intelligent Routing
Connectivity and Adapter Management
Governance across all applications
Know the Functional Requirements
Project stakeholders need to identify:
Applications or tools to be integrated
Information/data required to be synchronized across tools
Mapping of metadata between applications or tools
Avoid meaningless data replication if it does not address any specific business need
Relationships between artifacts of different tools to be synchronized
Integration rules to follow
Identify which tools and items need bi-directional data integration and which need one-way integration
Identify the conditions for which data would flow from one tool to another
Data latency requirements
For some tool, it may be sufficient to synchronize the data on a daily basis and for some other tool, it may be required to synchronize data in every minute
Know the Non Functional Requirements
The non-functional requirements to be considered are:
Performance
Determine the data volume that would be transported on a regular basis – Define performance metrics upfront
Determine the permitted latency limits
Determine the growth of data over the years
Plan hardware configuration to support probable data volume up to at least two years
Scalability
Understand the scalability options
Plan for load balanced servers based the load of on your data flow
Security
Understand and document security requirements
Ensure compliance with organizational data security policies
Encrypted storage and transport of security credentials
Reliability
Understand and document reliability measures needed
Check whether the integration framework will provide the required reliability measures
Availability – Failover
Understand the availability and failover options
Plan for configuring these options based on your availability needs
Migration
Define your data migration needs
Check with the vendor – how to implement data migration
Monitoring
Failures and faults at the services/ adapters level
Failures and errors at the data synchronization level
Notifications/Reporting for failures/ errors
Integration Health Dashboard
Focus on User Management
User Management is done differently in different applications or tools. Some tools support LDAP (Light-weight Directory Access Protocol) based user management while others have their own user management functionalities. Application integration requires user synchronization between different tools. An Integration Platform should provide the following options for it:
LDAP/ Active Directory based User Management support for all applications
Automated User Mapping Policies between applications
Manual User Mapping between applications
Any central User Management system shared by all applications
Work on Project/Template Management Setup
Organizations deal with hundreds of projects. Reusing the configuration setup done for integrating several applications across projects is the key to success of an Integration Platform deployment. An Integration Platform should support the following best practices to facilitate an integration setup:
Automation in Integration Setup for large number of projects
Integration Templates for different project types
Set of applications to be integrated
Metadata mapping between objects from different applications
Set of Integration Flows or Rules
New projects inherited from the above templates based on the project type
Templates administered by Process/ Tools Group
Project specific Integration Setups are managed by Project Managers
Select Integration Adapters/ Connectors
Stakeholders need to identify the integration use cases upfront and ensure that the adapters/ connectors can support easy and effective implementation of those use cases.
Identify the tools, 3rd party and homegrown, for which Integration Adapters would be needed
For standard applications, discuss and define:
Tool
Event
Action
IBM RequisitePro – Requirements Management Tool
A Requirement is approved for implementation in a particular release.
HP Quality Center – Test Management Tool
RequisitePro Requirement is replicated in Quality Center as a Test Requirement.
HP Quality Center
Test Cases created by Tester in Quality Center to test the functionality provided by the above Requirement. Test Cases are executed and Test Results are recorded in Quality Center.
IBM RequisitePro
Test Results for the Requirement are replicated in RequisitePro.
Learn the Deployment Stages
Follow the best practices for deploying an integration platform.
Staging environment
Set up Development environment
Set up Test environment
Testing
Configure Test Cases to verify your Integration Use Cases
Execute Tests on Development and Test servers
Perform load testing
Perform security testing
Perform reliability testing – check the scenario when tools are down or offline
Perform availability and failover testing
Production
After successful testing, deploy the integration platform and adapters on Production servers
Ensure failure/exception alerts are sent to the right people
Set up regular backup of the relevant integration components
How Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform Helps
Kovair Omnibus is the leading Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) integration technology available for Application Development and IT tools. With standardized SOA based tool-specific Omnibus adapters, one can create his or her own tools ecosystem. These tools can be from any vendor, or any legacy data, or any custom homegrown application development and IT tools.
Kovair’s Omnibus integration technology has major advantages that are not typically found in the vendor-specific point tools or even a suite of tools.
Conclusion
Organizations continually face challenges in finding out ways to leverage more ROI out of their existing infrastructure and applications. Having an effective Application Integration strategy is critical to taking on this daunting challenge. Choosing the right integration technology and following the best practices to establish an agile, reliable and scalable platform that is equipped to extend the life of your existing proven applications can meet your future application development demands.
