Integration Infrastructure Management is the New Black

Information Technology (IT) has moved through many clearly defined eras. I don’t feel the need to list them all, but the latest one clearly is the move from discrete computers to virtualized software-configured environments, that we all colloquially call “the cloud”.

And with each technological generation, we have improved the methods we use to integrate discrete modules of technology, and increased the level of automation. Today most code is created to be portable, using structured languages that pull from libraries of code (created just a few times) and used many millions of times. This has allowed the development of applications to move in creative ways, agile and DevOps ways of thinking driving down the time to market.

A consequence of “the cloud” is that instead of buying physical technology, we all lease components from various cloud vendors, to run our portable code. This has meant that integration engineering has become one of the largest line items in enterprise IT, partly because other areas have diminished as separate areas of spend, but mostly because now the focus is on connecting even more components.

Application stacks today look like complex roadmaps, and the intelligence built into every element allows for a near-infinite number of interconnections. Systems like messaging middleware struggle to keep up with the change requests, as the processes that made sense in previous eras struggle to move quickly enough to keep up with a business’s continual need to spin up and spin down elements.

The latest advancements in user interfaces for messaging middleware platforms such as MQ and Kafka don’t adequately allow for secure and private self-service or cloud-level automation and orchestration.

For this, you need to look at tooling that considers cross-platform, cross-application integration infrastructure management (sometimes referred to as i2M).

i2M is a new category of thinking about how you manage your integration infrastructure. It considers how you use integration engineering in the cloud era to provide your business with faster, higher quality integration, and provides a method of making use of integration knowledge to improve key areas of your overall IT.

To find out more about i2M visit us here.