The escalation of digital transformation in companies has led corporations to rethink how they do just about everything within the technology landscape, from culture to systems programming approach. In this scenario, the term modernization of integration has become frequently used to address situations of evolution in the company. For example, application modernization has become such a hype that consulting firms have specific services to carry out the evolution of legacy applications.

This is also true in the topic of integration between systems. Corporations are looking for alternatives to implement integration solutions that are in line with the modern architectures currently being developed by new applications! The scenario, however, is still an assessment of how the new modern integrations will coexist and integrate with legacy systems that should last a long time.

Principles of Modernization of Integration

To help design a modern integration architecture, we have listed a number of integration modernization principles in which we believe:

• Cloud-Native: All modern applications are already being developed in this model, and integrations that also comprise applications must follow the same path. The key point here is to be prepared to run on new technology stacks as well as to have automation, run in containers, scale automatically, etc., that is, to have all the benefits that can be offered by this approach.

• Event-Driven Integration: I consider this principle the most important one since the consequence of adopting it brings great benefits such as resilience, scalability, and extensibility. Nevertheless, the main change lies in the fact that integrations occur in real time, that is, it is not necessary to wait for the D-1 to create a batch process to perform the transfer of hundreds of records in the batch model.

• Hybrid Deployments: The integration processes should run in different deployment scenarios, whether they are multi-cloud or on-prem format. In this scenario, there must be specific components to collect and receive integration events that are very close to the origin and destination of the integrations.

• Security: This is a key factor in modern integrations, since the possibility of running in multiple environments and providing integrations beyond the corporation’s borders, such as integration with partners, requires the management of security risks. Policies for authentication, authorization and protection against vulnerabilities must be included in the integration designs.

• Real-Time Observability: Another key principle is real-time observability, which means having monitoring and governance over all integrations as close as possible to real time. This feature implies having observation events that react to monitoring events, such as alerts are generated when permitted error limits are reached. Another important point is to have end-to-end traceability, from the origin of the integration to the destination, in great detail.

Final thoughts on the Modernization of Integration

Integration between systems is a latent need that should continue to grow with the advent of modern architectures such as cloud services, microservices, and serverless. There is a growing need for integration between system components, although an important factor is the fact that there is still a need for coexistence and integration with legacy systems.

Indeed, the integration architecture must evolve and accompany the modernization of applications while using essentially the same principles with which the applications are built. This should promote a much greater synergy between the new applications and the new integration processes regarding mainly the stack of technologies, standards, and principles.