System integration is essential to overall business performance. It provides a complete view of businesses and allows them to zoom into specific processes and workflows. System integration challenges are something that businesses in 2022 cannot do without—especially mid-sized and large companies.
Building the right integration strategy will allow you to maintain an uninterrupted data flow between the different systems your organization use to make sense of the enormous amounts of data you probably already have. One of the best ways to achieve this is through a comprehensive integration platform. It’s not always easy to integrate all your data. System integration comes with several challenges, and it’s important to choose the right tool for your business. Otherwise, you risk creating bottlenecks further down the line or ending up with the wrong platform.
It is vital to assess the capabilities of each solution you’re considering and see whether it can help you solve the challenges you’re facing. When selecting your integration vendor, remember to watch out for underwater stones, too. This article discusses common integration challenges in 2022, along with tips and ideas on how to tackle them.
Data is Collected in Silos
Data silos are a major issue for businesses. If each department is using its systems without connecting them to the rest of your software ecosystem, you’re collecting data from many disparate sources that aren’t in sync. It is difficult to get a clear overview of your business processes or maintain seamless communication between teams.
Large informational silos that aren’t connected to the rest of the organization make your data difficult to access and use, making your data a liability instead of an asset.
Comprehensive integration solutions facilitate key business decisions. They provide stakeholders with instant access to up-to-date enriched data from all business areas, such as:
- Service availability
- System performance
- Risk and security assessments
- Progress on development projects
- Customer satisfaction
- Financial performance
To use the data from different sources, you need to connect them, and a no-code integration platform like ZigiOps helps immensely.
The right integration platform allows each team to correlate data from different sources, which has several benefits:
- Faster error detection & resolution
- Data is automatically enriched, making it more useful
- Data becomes more accessible for all business units
- The decision-making process is improved as it relies on a more comprehensive overview of the available information.
Each Team is Using Different Systems
In most organizations, each team uses systems that they’re familiar with and are hesitant to use the apps of peers, even if they provide highly valuable information and insights.
Each enterprise software has its own purpose for a specific use case. The trouble is you have to align different systems to improve cross-team collaboration and make sure data is easy to access by everyone who needs it.
Many apps come with basic integration capabilities and are used with the rest of your software stack out of the box., these do not completely solve the challenges organizations are facing. If you need to connect systems bi-directionally, gather and correlate multiple data types, or join more than two apps, a no-code integration platform will be your best bet.
You Have Several Integration Use Cases
Cross-team and cross-company integrations can be incredibly complex. If you have multiple use cases you need to tackle simultaneously, things can quickly get out of hand.
Building a simple integration sequence in Zapier is easy enough for simple use cases. However, if you’re dealing with a more comprehensive integration scenario, you’ll have difficulty using a platform that doesn’t have the right customization capabilities.
When faced with complex integration scenarios, some companies decide to develop their integrations internally. It cannot be a long-term strategy: budgets balloon easily, and very few organizations have the necessary skill set easily available.
An alternative strategy that is also much more cost-efficient is to use a no-code integration platform. For instance, ZigiOps has the right customization capabilities, allowing for more advanced, bi-directional integrations. Therefore, you can set up your integrations in minutes instead of days or weeks, even for the most complex use cases.
You Need to Scale Your Integrations
Scaling integrations based might look simple: after all, if you can forward ten incidents from ServiceNow to Jira, why would 100 or 1000 be a challenge?
However, if you’re not using a reliable integration solution, you’ll soon start noticing delays or inconsistencies at higher volumes of data. And indeed, high availability is crucial for businesses and is a principle that should extend to your integration platform.
We’ve designed ZigiOps with high availability (HA) in mind: our HA feature helps our clients maintain system availability and uptime, regardless of the volume of integrated data and potential server failures or system downtimes.
In addition to that, each of our system integration templates is infinitely scalable. They are fully customizable and can adapt to any scenario.
You Need Bi-Directional Integrations
Bi-directional integrations are a must since they transfer and update data between the source and target systems. However, they aren’t always easy to set up – and you would need an integration platform for the issue.
For example, if you’re only using your apps’ native integration features, you then have to set up a bi-directional integration between two tools. Most of the apps that can integrate with other apps offer only one-way connectivity, and many integration platforms do not feature truly bi-directional integrations, either.
If you need to connect your software tools bi-directionally, your best bet would be a robust integration platform like ZigiOps. ZigiOps offers hundreds of bi-directional templates you can use out-of-the-box. It allows you to customize all elements of your integration and adapt it to your exact use case.
Conclusion
System integration comes with several challenges that slow down data flows and negatively impact collaboration. We hope you now have a big picture of what is coming ahead and get ready.
