Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Integrating Data Across Environments

As soon as you start dealing with the cloud, you must establish a way to deal with the fact that you have data that potentially spans multiple environments. Of course, your data probably does span multiple environments today, but it’s under your control. How do you integrate all this data? Most companies very quickly find that they must contend with many different integration scenarios.

Three integration scenarios

The three most common cloud integration scenarios are

On-premises data center to cloud

Connectivity between (or among) clouds

Connectivity in clouds

We discuss each of these in this section.

On-premises data center to cloud

Connectivity from the data center to the cloud is one of the basic uses of cloud integration. The typical IT organization manages its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system within its data center and uses a SaaS environment to manage sales leads. Sales, order, invoice, and inventory data must be synchronized across these systems for the company to function properly. This can be a major cultural shift for an organization that’s used to having full control over its line-of-business applications.

There is little or ...