Demand for Cloud Integration Is Growing, But Now Less of a Worry

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed

Integration is a pressing issue for cloud solutions, but IT and business leaders are less concerned about it than in the past, according to an August cloud adoption study.

Saugatuck, a research and consultancy firm, asked IT leaders to rank their concerns about enterprise cloud. In the past, integration has been in the top two, but this year, it fell to fourth position, behind:

• Data security/privacy concerns
• Data/transaction integrity concerns
• Regulatory compliance

It’s not that there’s less need for integration. It’s that cloud businesses and cloud integration providers now offer toolkits and solutions that simplify integration for the most commonly used cloud and on-premise applications, writes Mike West, vice president and distinguished analyst for the IT research firm and consultancy Saugatuck, in a recent Information Management article.

“The demand for integration in today’s business environment is greater than ever before and, fortunately, the tools are far more capable,” West states. “Today integration is the most critical competency we have discovered to leverage Cloud business solutions in the Boundary-free Enterprise.”

IT executives were less concerned about integration than their line-of-business counterparts, which is perhaps a reflection of IT’s better understanding of the technology.

“For IT, cloud integration is fast becoming a non-issue,” West says.

Another factor that may have played a role in soothing integration fears is that business managers are now more astute about the importance of cloud integration.

A global survey by Oracle found that 81 percent of business managers say full integration is an important issue, Rex Wang, vice president of Oracle’s Product Marketing, pointed out in Forbes. Of 1,355 senior business managers surveyed, 81 percent cited full integration as an important requirement for achieving the full benefit of cloud computing.

They’ve learned the hard way. Wang says integration is a leading reason to pull the plug on cloud applications. The survey found that companies have abandoned approximately one cloud application a year due to integration problems.

Saugatuck’s surveys predict that by 2017, more companies will seek out cloud pure-play solutions. This shift will further drive the need for cloud-to-cloud integration, West writes.

Neither the press release nor West’s Information Management article provided specifics about the size of companies or how many people were surveyed in the Saugatuck study, “2013 Global Cloud IT Adoption, Use, and Benefits Survey,” although both indicated it was a global study of IT executives and business leaders.