Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

How PaaS Abstracts Connectivity and Integration

No application or business service lives in isolation — whether you’re talking about a cloud or an on-premises data center. In reality, applications have to communicate and exchange data. The data must be secured throughout all lifecycle stages and accurately mapped between services as needed. To ensure consistent and accurate data across the hybrid cloud, these applications and related services must perform and act as a single integrated environment.

Connecting these applications can be particularly challenging when you consider the various integration scenarios that may occur in cloud environments. First, the PaaS platform residing in a hybrid world has to contend with a variety of applications with complex interfaces that the IT organization has no control over and little visibility into. In addition, even SaaS applications with well-defined interfaces may reside on a variety of different cloud environments. For example, many CRM systems have their own dedicated PaaS environment. Other cloud applications are built as ad hoc projects and aren’t designed to work well with other environments. From a process and data integration standpoint, all these various environments need to interact with key systems of record such as general ledger or human resources systems.

PaaS must be architected so that it can handle many unanticipated or ...