ETL vs iPaaS: What's the difference?

iPaaS vs. ETL

More than 2.5 quintillion bytes are created every day. Companies are currently under enormous pressure to find the best and fastest path to efficient management, and cloud integration to gain business intelligence. Without a way to monitor, manage, and process this enormous amount of data, it's almost impossible to use and find value from this information. Enter data management tools.

Only there's one problem. The sheer amount of different data management and integration solutions make it difficult to decide which application and platforms are suited for your business. iPaaS integration solution is built with two goals in mind: providing no-code integration solutions and suitable for adjustable and real-time SaaS applications. This remains important for cloud-based services because of ease of use and the ability to change software with compromise. Yet, Enterprise Service Bus (ETL) integrate complex IT systems and architecture. It holds together on-premise and legacy systems, but it's hard to change and manage your data.

iPaaS vs. ETL: four key differences

Modern companies rely on iPaaS and/or ETL integration solutions to control and manage their data. Four things to keep in mind when it comes to knowing the differences between an ETL and an iPaaS integration solution: Application Integration, Scalability, Multi-Tenancy, and Data Governance.

Application Integration
ETLs are recognized for their strength to handle different complex tasks within on-premises or legacy systems. But you can count on ETLs to control and manage various applications and data. They lack the means and flexibility to support cloud integration solutions without compromise. Alumio iPaaS moves between your source and target applications using plug-ins. Your applications can both take in and push data out to flow from the source endpoints to the target endpoint.

ETL scalability vs iPaaS scalability
Digital Commerce is moving fast, and business needs to change to keep up with cloud-based applications. Data management solutions need to be adaptable and flexible to keep up with modern SaaS applications vast demand for data. When it comes to scalability, flexibility, an ETL and iPaaS vary in their capability to provide scalable solutions. An Extraction, Transformation, and Load solutions can be counted on for vertical scaling within an existing architecture, which means that an ETL can expand existing compute resources such as power, capacity, or speed. iPaaS is better suited for horizontal scaling, which usually means adding new applications or changing applications within the existing environment.

iPaaS Multi-Tenant environments
Multi-tenancy is the capacity for multiple groups of users to access data stored on a server simultaneously. Think of stock, sale, and user data used across different departments such as operations and sales. Any department can access and interact with the same data easily accessible from anywhere in a multi-tenant environment.
iPaaS solutions have a clear advantage when it comes to hosting multi-tenant environments. As a cloud solution, iPaaS open the door to real-time access to data stored in all applications and locations. ETL solutions are less flexible at handling this level of complexity.

Data Governance
iPaaS ability to secure and govern data is another crucial difference between ETL and iPaaS. Alumio iPaaS is equipped with a more effective governance capability than Extraction, Transformation, and Load solutions, including mechanisms and a dashboard to measure data quality, data profiling, and metadata management. Alumio iPaaS provides all of those and is GDPR Compliant.
ETL solutions often include data governance features; however, compared to iPaaS integration solution capabilities, ETLs lack features, and more robust data governance capabilities are found in iPaaS solutions. This is because iPaaS solutions were designed to integrate data from various systems while accounting for schema and other data modeling considerations. As a result, Alumio iPaaS data governance features are more comprehensive than those of ETL.

"Alumio iPaaS an integration platform ready for future growth"

iPaaS is better suited for horizontal scaling, which usually means the addition of new applications or components to the existing environment. Another key element of an iPaaS environment is interchangeability and scalability of integrations.

Without Alumio iPaaS

Don't create a tangled IT landscape

Data silos. A lot of custom code or so-called plugin connections result in having data silos.
Hard to monitor. Custom solutions have different levels of monitoring, which results in notification problems when issues occur.
Negative business impact when problems occur. Problems are hard to resolve and are not being notified. This results in losing orders, angry customers, and ultimately a big negative business impact.
Not secure and compliant. Having complex integrations is not helping to be compliant with privacy regulations nor to prove a secure IT landscape.
Future-dead. In this nightmare of integrations, it is not possible to add and connect new software to existing software without having a long and expensive IT project.

With Alumio iPaaS

Normalized Entitity of data

Scalability & Interchangeability. Fast, seamless connectivity to apps, databases, and simplify data exchange.
Happy customers. Always on top of problems with Alumio's monitoring and notifications cockpit.
Independency senior developers. Juniors can create 90% of the integrations without help of seniors. Your seniors can focus on the architecture consulting and coding the hard custom stuff.
Customizable interfaces without compromise. Front office and backoffice succes relies on solid integrations.
Easily connect legacy software. Possibilities to connect to old school, legacy software without getting headaches.