SaaS Integration - Are you Secure?
SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM On-Demand and NetSuite have brought about new archtiectures for IT. Typically, these solutions have been deployed to get around IT department red-tape - but now their importance is becoming key to the new enterprise and integration of these applications with existing on-premise enterprise applications is key.
Since 2001, CustomWare has been integrating systems both behind and outside of the corporate firewall and we've seen many technologies come and go. For SaaS integration, we use and recommend Cast Iron appliances for the following reasons:
- Security - Having a single appliance be the gateway between an internal and external network is the safest way to connect.
- Performance - Cast Iron is proven in robustness and performance.
- Flexibility - Cast Iron can be deployed in a hosted or cloud version, as well as behind the firewall - keeping you in control.
- Partitioning - your integrations can be separated into their own address space or virtual machine - this means the performance of your integrations in a hosted environment is not impacted by a "rogue neighbour".
- Plays nicely in an existing IT environment - Cast Iron integrates nicely with other ESB and internal integration solutions. Allowing your internal integration platform to focus on heavyweight internal integration and Cast Iron to take care of SaaS integration.
