Many organizations with complex software ecosystems want to change their way of working by moving away from old-fashioned, slow and heavy integration platforms. Ways that remove the need for long-term integration projects, expensive implementation costs, and fragile iPaaS software. Switching to MuleSoft, provider and Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), might be your solution. In this blog-post, I’ll give you five reasons why you should consider the most widely used integration platform of MuleSoft (Anypoint Platform).
#1 IT as a Business Partner, not a Provider
Previously we spoke about how MuleSoft speeds up Transformation through the establishment of a Center for Enablement (C4E). The fact is that every facet of an enterprise benefits to continuously develop and deploy applications that facilitate business functions and cater for customer interactions.
Shifting the Target of IT towards decentralized and federated access to IT Systems as reusable capabilities & data entities produces an agile IT Landscape. A Major benefit is a reduction in Time-to-Market providing the Enterprise with several opportunities to innovate and quickly respond to changes in the market and address customers’ concerns.
For these critical decisions and innovations to be successful, more insight is needed; which leads us to our next reason.
The Future of Integration
The fast evolution of modern technologies brings the opportunity to completely reimagine the foundation of enterprise integration. Download the white paper to find out how.
#2 Data-Driven Business
The abundant data passing through IT Systems and stored in its raw form can provide an enterprise with valuable insights to empower decisions when it is transformed and exposed as common business data entities. Concepts that sound simple but are not, such as a Customer 360 View, become simple to realize across the 3 API Layers:
- The System Layer unlocks your data silos;
- The Process Layer orchestrates, aggregates and consolidates your data into functional blocks;
- The Experience Layer guides your user experience on mobile and web applications and feeds into your Analytics & Insights.
Those Streams of Data flowing through your IT Landscape, which in 2021 will include several Cloud Services (Saas, IaaS, XaaS), are bound to raise the question: Can anyone tap into those streams? (Pun Intended) And this brings us to our next reason.
#3 Security By Design
One of the responsibilities of the C4E in achieving high delivery speed while maintaining an appropriate level of governance is the creation of integration templates to be used by developers outside the IT organization and as such are designed to contain logging, security and error handling.
MuleSoft supports an enterprise in providing secure access to information, applications and services only to authorized and legitimate users and systems through several tools/methods such as:
- Tokenization: Using an API Manager Policy to enforce OAuth 2.0 Access to an API or configure a Mule Application to connect to a service that requires authentication;
- Encrypted Communication: Supporting TLS for HTTP exposed applications and when connecting to FTPS, Email, & Sockets among others. More complex encryption/decryption and signing & signature validation of messages is supported through PGP, XML, or JCE;
- Encrypted Configuration Properties either for specific properties within a file or for the whole file.
#4 Accelerators & Connectors
In addition to storing the reusable Assets & Artefacts that are created internally, Anypoint Exchange gives your organization access to a plethora of extensions that enables you to integrate with multiple 3rd Parties such as AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, & Salesforce. These reduce the complexity of the flows that you need to build, simplify authentication, and simplify code maintenance.
In the last few years, Mulesoft has also added a number of prebuilt integration assets and instructions that can be used to Jumpstart projects. These accelerators are tackling some commonly used cases in customer service, e-commerce, human resources and healthcare.
#5 Legacy Modernization
While the opportunity to work on a Green-Field is always exciting, improving an existing ecosystem will garner more noticeable results and a bigger impact on your business goals. Introducing API-Led Connectivity to an IT Landscape can significantly improve legacy systems through either:
- Retiring Legacy Systems: decoupling consumers and providers allows the swapping of systems seamlessly minimizing the impact on current processes and systems;
- Exposing New Functionalities: transformation between legacy transports & formats and adding security policies (authentication & authorization) to provide more consumers access to data.
Hopefully, these five reasons to switch from your old integration platform to MuleSoft gave you the right insights and inspiration to consider a switch. Any questions or would you like to receive more information? Don’t hesitate to contact us!
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With more than 70 certified MuleSoft consultants and our +25 years of integration experience in projects within every sector you can think of, combined with a strong partnership with MuleSoft, enable Devoteam to guide your organization through every Integration related challenge. Looking for help? Feel free to contact us and we’ll see how we can help each other.