Agile Integration: What is it, and Why Enterprises Need it?

Covid-19 has generated a lot of businesses shaping forces. It shoved many enterprises on the digital landscape.

Enterprises vying for speed, resilience, and agility are transitioning towards digital platforms to set up overarching business models. However, haphazard adoption is doing more harm than good.

Halfway down the path enterprises are realizing that they are at crossroads. Success with transformative technologies requires agile integration at the core. Start-to-end integration enables enterprises to synchronize new & old technologies with minimum disruption.

****What is Agile Integration?
**
Agile integration is a new architectural framework that fuses three capabilities in the enterprise IT architecture:

• Distributed integration

• Containers

• Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

****Why enterprises need agile integration?
**
IT changes are happening at light speed. Only the last years' technology trends have vanished out of existence. Planning IT changes in the infrastructure is almost similar to changing the wheels of a car that is in motion.

Specifically, for IT teams that are accustomed to 6 months or for 24 months of marathon cycles to make changes. On the other hand, digital leaders like Netflix, Amazon, and Uber can make thousands of code changes in their IT without any disruption. These behemoths are harnessing the power of agile integration.

Critical elements of agile integration infrastructure
The agile infrastructure consists of three core elements:

Distributed integration: IT systems need various applications to connect with different other technologies in an ecosystem. The IT complexity requires integration hubs implemented as ESBs (Enterprise Service Buses). This distributed integration solves various technical problems. The ESBs are redirected in the most adaptive way for organizations to offer routing, error handling, transformation, enabling altering capabilities, and parsing data.

Containers: Modern-day enterprises are virtualized through container technologies. They eliminate the need for a dedicated, permanent server for virtualization. They are just an updated version of libraries and operating environments for running a particular application. Containers change the environment in a consistent and repeatable instance for enabling continuous delivery or continuous integration.

APIs: The information infrastructure in an IT ecosystem consists of more than thousands of applications, assets, and systems. APIs are basically interfaces to connect them with underlying integration technology. It is the set of rules or definitions that show how applications can communicate. APIs are unique from the final application. They determine how applications can interact with other applications and are used by developers as building blocks for their projects.

Conclusion
Agile integration is not a project, it is a process. It enables a smoother path to launch new or update previous services. It paves way for creating adaptive and agile infrastructure. There are three pillar technologies that support this concept:

• Distributed Integration: It uses enterprise integration and messaging for data and systems.

• API Management: It creates interfaces to give a proper structure for integrating applications.

• Containers: It closely aligns operational projects and development operations with software projects.

Agile integration can help enterprises in establishing a smoother symbiosis between people, processes, and technologies and aligning them with organizational objectives. Enterprises can envision an intelligent mesh that provides foundational support to their evolving IT and business systems. This advantage allows enterprises to wring value out of the data and monetize business systems for continued and lasting success.