Author
June 20, 2022
Organizations of all sizes are starting to recognize the challenges of working across multiple systems simultaneously. Improvements to data integration platforms can help streamline processes, reduce costs, simplify employee workload, and drive company growth and performance.
These benefits are no secret. The global integration system market is set to grow by 11.7% by 2025. But what is system integration?
System integration generally refers to connecting a variety of subsystems or components into a single, large system — typically by linking different software solutions (both within a business or to third-party organizations) to enable them to function as a single unit. When IT systems work in combination, costs decline and the speed of data and information transfer is increased.
Big Data and Potential Big Problems
Businesses today generate more data than ever before. They also spend a lot of time managing all the data they produce, as well as collecting data from suppliers and clients. The faster your business is growing, the more data flows in and out.
Did You Know? Companies around the world generate more than 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data each day. That is a lot of time spent on generating, managing, and collecting.
If your various processes and systems aren’t all aligned, some of that valuable data could be lost, and simple tasks can take longer to complete. But managing all the data-related operations in your company separately is ineffective, inefficient, and just plain difficult to do.
Still need convincing? Let’s take a closer look at six benefits of system integration your company could realize.
Reasons Why You Need to Integrate Systems
1. System Integrations Improve Efficiency
How can system integration make work easier for your team? An effective integration system empowers your staff to work within a single, central ecosystem with a 360-degree view of all your data. Instead of making the same change in multiple places across a range of systems, views and processes, one change updates everything.
By eliminating the complexity associated with unintegrated systems, you remove the need to train employees on multiple systems and tools. Onboarding time is reduced, the risk of human error is minimized and you can deploy new programs more rapidly. In short, it saves time and effort, increases production and just makes your team happier. Who wouldn’t want that?
2. Costs Go Down
Maintaining multiple systems means procuring and installing multiple components. It’s a lot of work. And if your company isn’t paying an internal team of experts to maintain your disparate systems, you may find yourself outsourcing — which can drive up costs pretty rapidly, depending on the number and complexity of your systems.
An effective integration solution can eliminate your reliance on the costly subscriptions, updates, and licensing fees that come with multiple systems. It also reduces the cost of data storage, since all your data lives in a single location.. This data consolidation also enables better data-based decision-making, which can save a lot of money in the long term.
3. Big Data Analysis Improves
The right system integration solution can enhance your overall ability to analyze data. While most legacy systems require you to analyze data from different spaces, integration delivers data in a centralized space, giving you a single source of truth.
Without a data integration system, the only way to compare data across legacy systems is to download it from each system and import it into a separate tool — a time-consuming, resource-intensive process that increases the risk of errors and oversights. With an integrated system, you gain a panoramic view of all business information, making it easier to see patterns that can be difficult to detect in a legacy environment.
4. Information and Data Security
Regardless of your industry or vertical, your business probably has data you wouldn’t want in the wrong hands. You may even be bound by compliance measures that require you to ensure sensitive or business-critical data is protected. When sensitive data gets out into the world, your business can face significant financial consequences — as well as a loss of trust among your customers.
Data security is challenging at the best of times, but having to manage data flowing through multiple environments, being accessed by multiple team members makes the task a monumental one. With a single centralized system to protect, the risk of data loss or a security breach decreases.
Most system integration solutions allow customization and the implementation of security measures and tools. With custom-designed security protecting your single system, the risk of unauthorized parties accessing your valuable data is minimal. And when your data is secure, your business is safe and your customers remain happy and loyal.
5. Real Time Data Analytics
Relying on data transferred from multiple siloed systems means you rarely get a current view of your business. Transferring large amounts of data across systems can take time, and by the time your data is ready to analyze, it’s already out of date.
An integrated data system, however, eliminates latency and the need for transfers and gives you access to up to date (and often real-time) analytics. Access to real-time, or near real-time, data empowers you to make more rapid — and more accurate — decisions. You can keep stakeholders apprised on the most recent business developments, enabling them to pivot quickly and make fact-based decisions.
6. Innovation and Growth are Faster
The pandemic highlighted the importance of modern system integration. Digital-first strategies that were slowly gaining ground became vital as companies sent employees home to work and realized that teams didn’t have to be in the office to be productive.
With an integrated system, your business has a central space that your workforce can access from anywhere you choose. Deploying teams from their homes or the other side of the globe is easy and quick, and all employees have access to a central, integrated system that facilitates communication and development with minimal friction.
Data flowing through a single connected channel simplifies other business processes, from finance to human resources to sales, leading to enhanced information access and data analytics. This means teams like sales and marketing can see real-time data and use that information to cross-sell or upsell your products and services more effectively. Integration also benefits your IT department, freeing up resources to address backlogs or develop new initiatives that generate a better outcome for the entire company.
Digibee Makes Enterprise Integration Easier Than Ever
With Digibee, you wouldn’t have to think twice about other system integration solutions. We manage the complexity of data and systems integration in an agile, efficient way, empowering your business to adopt a future-proof architecture and unlock innovation. Digibee’s drag-and-drop interface means integration creation is up to ten times faster than with other systems, and our pre-configured connectors let integration architects and developers bypass the complexity of interacting with third-party systems. Our intuitive, customizable dashboard lets you monitor all transactions, ensuring comprehensive integration management.
To learn more about Digibee’s enterprise integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) and how your company can leverage it for growth and efficiency, book a demo today
