WDCi Blogs

If you are, then you no doubt have encountered the security team of your company. If you are small enough to not have a security team, then you probably can get by with opening some firewall ports, but otherwise you may be in for a long wait, and a few lively discussions.

Typically,  security teams do not like to trust “SaaS platforms” and open up firewall ports for inbound connections.

A common problem I see is that while even the most flexible organisations may have infrastructure to deal with this in a secured zone like UAT or Production, most of us have development servers on our internal domain, and getting that opened through the firewall for inbound services is very unlikely to happen. If it does it will most likely require expensive services and additional routers ensure the path through is secured.

So how can you get around this issue?  Dell-Boomi the leader in SaaS integration has a neat solution. Outbound connections and webServices are a dime a dozen, and when they happen through a regular port (443 outbound) then they are simple.

What if you could get a platform like Salesforce.com or Rightnow or Netsuite to call an internal service, that  was proxied  through a firewall friendly connection.  E.G. a Salesforce.com sandbox calling an internal service running on your Dev server without opening a firewall port, all secured by an enterprise ready integration platform.

This is available today, and probably at a fraction of the cost and effort to get your security team involved in opening firewall ports.

if you want to know more, come talk to us at WDCi. We can help you get set up in days, not weeks.

The recent Google Mail outage certainly resulted in a lot of blogs and complaints amongst its users. As part of the large user community we did feel the impact when our operations were disrupted. Fortunately this ordeal was resolved two hours later and the overall impact to us in our timezones was minimal, not that I want to downplay the impact to some customers in any way, we all need our email.

It is definitely inexcusable for outages to happen but IMO what happened with Google Mail is unfortunate but, software is built by people and people make mistakes.  We have to be realistic that 100% uptime isn’t that feasible, cloud or no cloud.  We have to understand the risks involved with our data and plan accordingly.   I remember going through contract negotiations in a past life and a customer asking for a guarantee that a particular vendor’s software didn’t have bugs, our legal counsel replied that he couldn’t guarantee it didn’t have bugs, but that he could definitely guarantee it would, and he was only half joking.

In another past life we were using Microsoft Exchange which was outsourced to a third party provider, not only did it cost many more multiples than Google Apps, we also experienced frequent outages and whilst our supplier worked overtime to get us up and running again, they had to rely on support from their vendor to resolve issues, sound familiar?  IMO I’d much rather run with SaaS from a vendor such as Google than an ASP that is relying on a vendor to support them in outages of this kind.

Google has taken some measures with the introduction of Apps Status Dashboard that promotes transparency on their system availability. On top of that a 15-day SLA credit was given to all its Premier Edition users as compensation.  For us we have eMail at the host and at our clients, plus we sync our calendars, so that minimised our impact.  I think the major gap is Google Docs, and hopefully that hole will improve with the release of a better offline tool for Docs, Gears is ok, but not yet complete in my opinion.  Fingers crossed that GDrive is a reality in the not too distant future.  We also use another handy tool, Syncplicity to sync our on-premise data into the cloud, we’ve all had ourlaptop/desktop fail and lost valuable data in the past, so we use this tool to minimise our exposure with any on-premise data.

As SaaS subscribers we have researched our vendors well enough that we trust that they have a reliable support, backup and contingency process just as we have a reliable contingency process for our important applications and data.  SaaS doesn’t necessarily mean that the service will not suffer from the occasional hiccups, just like our on-premise applications did before we moved them into the cloud.  As a consumer of SaaS applications, the recent incident does serve as a timely reminder to us to review and identify where we are exposed, measure that risk and if appropriate put a contingency in place.

Our objective is to simplify integration as much as possible, resulting in lower costs to implement and maintain. Lowering the cost and speeding up the time to market will enable companies of any size to utilise integration technology and eliminate manual intervention and data processing. Let’s face it you don’t have to be a big company to want to save time and money. Apart from using a mature tool such as Boomi Atomsphere, we work with you to define what’s important for a successful integration. Our process takes into account the following:

• What are we trying to achieve: the deadlines, the business drivers
• Connectivity requirements: the applications involved, the processes that need to be integrated
• Data formats: the best way to extract and synchronise your data, data examples
• Data volumes: what data volumes are involved and what is the frequency of updates
• What the integration process looks like: what does it need to do to connect, transform, synchronise and update your data
• How will the process run: when does the integration happen, ie hourly, daily, weekly etc, what happens if an error occurs
• Managing change: how are modifications and minor changes to the integration handled

We’ve put an outline of this process onto our website to help you kick-start your integration.  A bit of preparation will help you understand the process involved and will minimise the cost and frustrations in building out an integration solution.  If you like the idea, have a question or suggestion, email us @ rio@wdcigroup.net and let us know.

I’ve read a lot of blogs/articles about integration being a significant barrier to SaaS adoption in the enterprise. Sure integration can be a challenge, but in my opinion it’s not as scary as some of the articles imply.

Using a tool like Boomi, implemented as part of a solution like RIO makes use of the excellent APIs that many of the SaaS vendors have put in place. Boomi offers a true integration solution, has more than 40+ connectors/adapters and enables you to integrate to just about anything. Admittedly some of the SaaS vendors (and many of the on-premise vendors) present some challenges to integration, but there’s always a way to extract and insert your data.

I’m not downplaying the fact that integration can be a challenge, I’m just suggesting that it’s possible and there are tools out there to do it and to do it fast.  Before we partnered with Boomi we looked at 20+ tools for SaaS integration and whilst Boomi was ahead of the pack, many of the tools were decent and have come a long way in the past 12 months.

I’ve posted some reasons why we think that RIO is hot, you may want to check it out.  From our perspective, integration from SaaS to SaaS and SaaS to on-premise applications is achievable within days, with a solution that allows for ongoing monitoring and maintenance at a low-cost.