While SaaS does offer useful IT resources at a great price, data integration do still remain one of its biggest challenges. Proper data integration means adding a new cloud source and consumers to your current IT environment. This usually done using on-demand data integration tactics that require your business to be able to query data on the web through security tools such firewalls and to understand the SaaS provider's API.

SaaS is Multiplicitous

In the early days, SaaS evolved from the on-demand service that involved from ASP and single-tenant web applications to multi-tenant SaaS applications. It branched from this into product platforms and APIs, with a more customizable service. However, this is also the difficulty involved in reintegration of SaaS. An example of its multiplicity is seen in social networking. A social network can have millions of users that use the network for collaboration and interaction. The network would also have numerous third-party applications that are used for entertainment or business purposes. Such multiple end-to-end resources would need various cloud data centers to maintain and also creates an environment of multiple application deployments. At a corporate level, this leads to silos of data that need to be managed manually and provides challenges for this disintegrated data to be reintegrated.

Ubiquity and SaaS

SaaS is synonymous with ubiquity. It provides users the ability to not be chained to a head office or company headquarters. The ability to access SaaS applications anywhere has been one of the driving features within enterprise by 48% of companies. For a small company that uses SaaS in areas such as accounting and HR, having data stored in various backend locations could be effectively reintegrated within a company. IT Architects can tell you that this i more challenging in larger companies with the increasing number of deployments that need to be integrated from numerous sources. This produces a siloed or compartmental data effect in the cloud, which is not synchronized with applications located on-premise.

Complex SaaS Integrations

The complexity of SaaS also contributes to its distintegration of data. Think of it this way, instead of only having one menu with only one item to choose from, SaaS now provides numerous add-ons. The disintegration of SaaS has seen it evolve to a whole another level, not just for users, but also for SaaS providers. It is great within enterprise where complex functions are not needed. For example, document sharing. However, when a complex application needs to be deployed or a specialized extension is needed, SaaS is not ideal. Reintegration is more difficult when using SaaS-based on a legacy SOAP interface which it is not simple, and programming a custom integration is not easy for most small businesses.

The Why of Disintegration

The increased scalability of SaaS was inevitable. It started with the boom in open source and web-based applications fueling this fire. It was also coupled with the increase in more developers having access to more services to build SaaS apps. This also included a change in vendor strategies for data migration, replication and synchronization. So instead of integration being harder to complete, users who lacked technical skills could now perform key integration tasks such as extraction, transformation and validation of data. This disintegration has made SaaS applications more simple and led to a higher level of scalability. Knowing all this, isn't the real question you should be asking, "Is my SaaS provider disintegrating my data?"