By Honchew Seetoh, General Manager for Southeast Asia, Boomi
Speaking at the CIO Innovation Forum recently, I referenced a great expose by The New York Times on the Notre Dame Cathedral fire in April 2019. The article explains lucidly through forensic analysis how a series of missteps and the inability to accurately identify the source of data contributed to the blaze that collapsed the grand cathedral’s roof.
As a 10-digit alpha numeric code flashed on screens at Notre Dame Cathedral’s command centre, a security employee at the 850-year-old Cathedral was sent to inspect the attic of the adjacent Sacristy building instead. Only when a second alarm sounded 25 minutes later did officials realise that the grand old cathedral’s roof, nicknamed the “forest” was ablaze.
By then, it was a race against time to save the structure, its heritage and artefacts. Despite a sophisticated early warning system, poor training, data integration and configuration led to a catastrophic delay in first response. The parallel lessons for businesses are hard to ignore.
Speed of action through actionable meaningful data was critical in the Notre Dame example which when applied well could have prevented damage. Any sophisticated technology without accurate, actionable data cannot deliver success. Just as for the first responders at Notre Dame Cathedral, vague information will not help in challenging conditions. The ability to be able to make decisions at speed, accurately is dependent on insights derived from data from a myriad of business and infrastructure sources.
In my conversations with customers and partners in the region, I noted that organisations are still working with out-of-date integration approaches that are not only costly, but time-consuming and cumbersome to manage. As organisations embark on their digital journeys, they need data integration platforms that they can easily scale, and give them the ability to tap into new data sources including IoTs, while enabling the deployment of technology including artificial intelligence and data analytics. Additionally, as organisations transform to hybrid IT systems, the ability to operate with new cloud applications in public and private clouds will become a fundamental requirement.
During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses and organisations scrambled to maintain the continuity of their day-to-day operations in a work-from-home environment, while simultaneously exploring digital solutions that may be adopted for the long term.
According to the EY 2021 Work Reimagined Employee Survey, when local pandemic restrictions are lifted, just 15% of SEA-based employees surveyed would opt to work from the office full time. The majority would prefer to work anywhere (32%), work remotely full time (29%), or in a hybrid work arrangement (23%).
For organisations to be agile, flexible, scalable and ready for the cloud, they should be ready to adopt these characteristics to cultivate a future-ready business environment:
Cloud-Native: A cloud platform built from inception readily provides scalability, high availability, and built-in redundancy. Retrofitting legacy integration technologies to be cloud ready cannot match the efficiencies and agility of a true cloud-native integration platform.
Open: Open architecture connects effectively the myriad emerging applications, data sources, and devices while being application and endpoint agnostic.
Low Code: IT teams are under profound pressure to do more, at speed and at “always-on” environments. Low-code integration platforms reduce the time needed to integrate applications and data, helping deliver projects quickly and cost-effectively.
Unified: Ultimately any iPaaS should underpin a range of integration patterns, both within the organization and across its partner network to provide access to high- quality data anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
Distributed and Multi-Tenant: When organisations are looking to integrate everything from on-premise, cloud, IoT and edge devices, while supporting exponentially growing data volumes, integration platform like iPaaS must deliver on the promise of low-latency, high performance, and automatic upgrades. Only an iPaaS with a distributed, multi-tenant architecture can deliver that agility, robust performance and flexibility.
A succession of errors contributed to the fire that caused the roof of the majestic Notre Dame Cathedral to collapse. Inadequate training, data integration, and configuration resulted to a disastrous first-response delay. Businesses require scalable data integration platforms that facilitate the adoption of technologies such as artificial intelligence and data analytics. To prevent repeated occurrences, business strategies should be driven by fundamental principles that enable organizations to be agile, flexible, and scalable.