As the need for integration and automation grows, IT leaders are looking for new ways to combat integration backlogs and security and governance concerns – all while reducing the drain placed on IT resources to handle the influx of requests for these projects.
A recent market study from InformationWeek found that the move common complaints from internal customers about IT departments were the length of backlogs (41 percent) and security and governance concerns (37 percent).
According to the study, enterprise needs are not being met, with the survey showing the departments most likely to experience the worst backlogs include operations and facilities, sales and marketing, HR, and even the IT team itself.
In many organizations, when there’s a large backlog, this can lead to other departments going around IT and trying to build out their own integrations or automations – something often referred to as rogue or shadow IT. Often, this is something that central IT doesn’t necessarily know or have control over as a result.
In an effort to prevent this from happening in the first place, and to cut down on the backlogs in existence now, many IT leaders are looking for automation and integration tools like iPaaS to help them do the following:
- Be more competitive.
- Be more nimble.
- Reduce friction across the enterprise.
- Improve the end-user experience.
iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is paving the way for more efficient and better-governed enterprise integration and automation. iPaaS centralizes all integrations into one hub with a library of connectors to common systems such as Workday, Oracle, your ITSM platform, Salesforce, the Active Directory, Azure, and hundreds more, as well as any APIs. With all systems connected and data points now secured in one spot, end-users can leverage the platform to move data, transform data, and build out automations and workflows using a visual flow builder that can be triggered from a field change, a form fill, or any number of actions.
For example, it is possible to build out a flow to update the Active Directory when a request is made to add a user to a group. This may come in as a ticket, but then the IT team can easily click on ‘approve’ and the system will automatically trigger this workflow versus having to manually do this. The same can be done for tickets that come in for things like password resets, software provisioning, name changes – even onboarding and offboarding of employees.
Because iPaaS is codeless, it drastically cuts down on the amount of time needed to create integrations between systems and automations. In turn, this can reduce or eliminate those backlogs bogging down IT departments.