Challenge and Opportunity
Integrating cloud-based data with data inside the enterprise is increasingly important to many organizations, yet many rely on exporting data to spreadsheets and text files for this purpose. But these are outdated approaches that cannot provide either secure access or accurate data. Nor are legacy extract, transform and load (ETL) tools an optimal choice, as they were not designed to connect to cloud-based applications and data sources.
Cloud-based data integration differs significantly from on-premises data integration as it is traditionally done. Typically this has involved large projects that change infrequently and the projects generally involve a few relatively large data feeds that have been optimized for batch processing. In contrast, cloud- based data integration often involves many data sources with new sources being added frequently. In addition, these sources may change at any time since they are not under the control of the enterprises using them.