Businesses have been using an array of technological tools to enhance efficiency and profitability. With the introduction of newer technical products, users are likely to face integration challenges.
A survey conducted by MuleSoft infers that only 29% of a company’s 1,000+ individual applications are integrated. This statistic highlights that data in silos can result in opportunity costs and unsustainable IT workloads that necessitate troubleshooting and fixes. This is where business integration can be used to synchronize IT and business objectives and align technology with them.
In this blog, we will discuss the importance of integration for businesses. Subsequently, we will highlight the integration challenges faced during the process and how MuleSoft helps overcome them.
Why is integration important for businesses?
Disconnected products and systems can cost your business in ways you cannot contemplate. Lack of data may lead to disappointing customers and loss of business. Unachievable orders and tremendous service requests can further slowdown business operations and hamper productivity.
The lack of integration affects areas such as technology innovation, applications, and systems. It has been found that only a few applications in an enterprise are interconnected. This poses a burden on the IT teams since implementation, governance, and maintenance require additional efforts leading to data turning into silos. Data silos result in a disconnected infrastructure, shattered operations, disturbed budget allocation, and unsatisfied customer experiences.
Connectivity tools such as MuleSoft help in overcoming integration challenges across the enterprise. Single solution integration tools do not adequately overcome the challenges of data communication or sharing, forbidding businesses from complex deployment integrations. More integration complexities result in silos while deploying these solutions.
In this article, we will discuss how MuleSoft – an enterprise integration tool, has been helping businesses to overcome integration challenges.
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
Mule 4 is the latest and most advanced MuleSoft version. It is a cost-effective, manageable, and scalable enterprise integration tool. It combines data and application integration across legacy systems, SaaS applications, and APIs.
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform helps address integration challenges for businesses and offers end-to-end integration access using a single dashboard. It is the next-generation runtime engine release that simplifies integration tasks and expedites delivery speed. It empowers a broad set of users to build composite applications and make the most of their digital initiatives.
In the next section, we will discuss how this tool serves as a unified integration for enterprises.
MuleSoft integration platform – Key elements
- Anypoint Studio
- Anypoint Studio is the MuleSoft integration development environment used for designing and testing Mule applications. It offers an added support Mule runtime engine 4.4, secure storage, DataWeave 2.4, and a ‘referenced by’ option for flows and sub-flows.
- Anypoint Monitoring
- A business transaction uses 35 different technology systems on average . With Anypoint Monitoring, you get to know the key performance indicators across these integrations and APIs transactions. It offers real-time metrics and dashboards to track digital transactions and trends and store data to perform root cause analysis. It has a dependency mapping to identify issues in each application, API, and application integration.
- Anypoint Security
- Anypoint Security offers a modern security model, advanced perimeter, and tokenization services to simplify security delivered across every node. Automatic tokenization helps to encrypt sensitive data with API policies to increase data security and minimize operational overhead. It also helps meet government compliance standards, including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), EU Data Residency, FedRAMP, and EU-US Privacy Shield.
- Anypoint Runtime Fabric
- Anypoint Runtime Fabric container helps manage multi-cloud Mule runtime deployments and execute multiple runtimes on the same Runtime Fabric. It simplifies deployment and Mule runtime management on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Virtual Machines (VMs), and physical servers that isolate apps, enabling enterprises to scale horizontally and deploy with zero downtime. It also helps manage multiple cloud deployments from Anypoint Platform’s cloud-based control plane.
- Mule flow triggers
- Without configuring logic for scheduled queries against target systems, Anypoint connectors contain built-in logic to respond to data changes, such as new database creation, change in Salesforce lead, or file creation.
- Mule SDK
- Mule SDK enhances Anypoint connector DevKit capabilities by complying with different Mule versions and supporting transactions and routers.
How does MuleSoft help in overcoming integration challenges?
MuleSoft is a cloud integration platform that unifies businesses to various third-party SaaS and SOA applications, APIs services, and systems on one platform. It is designed to offer ease of use, deployability, and hybrid readiness, with which you can write once and deploy anywhere.
With the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform’s robust set of solutions, businesses can connect through APIs, making information available quickly and eliminating frictions for obtaining unparalleled agility and speed. The MuleSoft integration platform changes how global enterprises connect apps, data, and devices, offering businesses an API-driven connectivity approach.
Additionally, the MuleSoft platform provides the below capabilities that help in overcoming challenges faced during enterprise integration:
Existence of APIs and reusable APIs
The MuleSoft platform allows you to build new APIs, design existing APIs interfaces, and simplify APIs management in the system. It enables data exposure to web apps, mobile, and connected devices securely. It also accredits enterprises with APIs, such as Experience, System, and Process APIs.
B2B processes
MuleSoft’s API connectivity allows enterprises to build reusable services across B2B processes and combine real-time methods for unified applications, data, and devices. In addition, it will enable a customizable approach to development and streamline the popular DevOps adoption methodologies, enabling continuous integration and implementations.
ESB integrations
MuleSoft provides enterprises a combination of application integrations and data benefits with the Anytime Platform and API-led connectivity. You can integrate simple to advanced applications with built-in templates and connectors.
Leveraging the Internet of Things
MuleSoft allows applications, data, and devices to connect from your enterprise and mount it from the cloud to the machines at the network edge. The real-life data sources such as point-of-sale systems and others offer a developer-oriented transport protocol. It also offers the added benefit of easy mobile access to data from backend systems, SaaS applications, and legacy databases.
Flexible architecture
The robustness of the MuleSoft suite helps in developing reusable APIs that are also easily manageable. The platform allows unfaltering quality, security, and versatility for easy interfacing, monitoring, and customization.
Conclusion
MuleSoft has been assisting various industries in integrating strategies and giving them the aid to hold on in the competitive market across verticals such as finance, healthcare, government, insurance, media, retail, etc.
In today’s world, when enterprises have diverse application sets, it becomes challenging for IT systems to:
- Connect to monolithic systems, with different business units working differently with data
- Choose the right integration tool
- Overcome integration challenges
An enterprise decides on a stack of products from a vendor and later identifies that the stack is either too complex to maintain or does not satisfy the customer’s needs. Choosing the right products is essential for businesses, as is the need to integrate other products or systems via a web service or libraries.
This is where MuleSoft becomes helpful in designing and implementing integrated solutions for current and future products across enterprises.
Get in touch with Nous to leverage the MuleSoft Integration Platform for your API management and integration initiatives.
