Cloud Integration in 2011: Informatica Cloud Adds Security, Governance for ‘Hybrid IT’ 
In late May, Informatica Cloud began shipping an updated integration service with features to support ‘hybrid IT’ environments that combine on-premise, SaaS and cloud.
Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 provides IT managers enterprise-class security, user management, governance and control across on-premise and SaaS environments.
“Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 enables ‘hybrid IT’ by extending unified, enterprise-class data integration services to the cloud,” Darren Cunningham, vice president of marketing for Informatica Cloud. told IDN. “These upgrades make the cloud a first-class citizen within the enterprise.” This extra focus on enterprise-class cloud integration reflects the growing popularity and maturity of the stand-alone SaaS marketplace, he added.
Learn more about Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 here:
“Business users used to adopt SaaS on their own, saying they needed to be more agile than their IT departments could support,” Cunningham told IDN. “But, fast forward to 2011, and today there is a huge pendulum swing back to IT, with a focus on enterprise-class features for SaaS, such as security, manageability administration and control and governance.”
Analysts in the cloud sector are also noticing that IT is again playing a key role in helping companies align SaaS and other off-premise cloud solutions with current on-premise resources.
“Enterprises are increasingly moving towards hybrid IT infrastructures combining on-premise and cloud applications, [and so] IT organizations are looking for ways to improve cloud governance and control while ensuring business continuity and continued innovation,” Robert Mahowald, IDC’s research vice president of SaaS and cloud services, said in a statement.
Informatica Cloud Summer 2011
Manages, Governs ‘Hybrid IT’
Cunningham explained how Informatica, a long-time provider of enterprise-class, on-premise integration, is seeing how SaaS adoption is evolving into a new hybrid IT model, where IT goes to multiple sources to provide business users the services they need.
“In hybrid IT, companies see a next step in SaaS adoption,” Cunningham told IDN. “As business users adopt more and more SaaS solutions, IT is starting to see they are playing a ‘service broker’ role, where IT manages a multi-sourced environment of cloud and on-premise solutions.”
For ‘hybrid IT’ to work well, all multi-sourced solutions should provide IT the same levels of control, governance and integration, Cunningham added. That means bringing enterprise class features to cloud services – without negating the cloud’s flexibility and ease of adoption.
To meet that balancing act, Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 delivers:
Secure Agent Console Manager allows admins to securely manage all aspects of the integration jobs that can be shared between on-premise and cloud deployments.
Master Data Management (MDM) Data Controls allows licensed Informatica MDM customers to embed the controls directly into cloud applications like Salesforce CRM to provide business users access to master data.
“We have the ability to integrate between the cloud and on-premise, or within either [with] MDM and data harmonization.”
Darren Cunningham
Vice President
Informatica Cloud
Pre-built Connectivity to Dozens of Cloud Solutions via the Informatica Marketplace’s Cloud Mall, including plug-ins for Salesforce Chatter, Eloqua, Netsuite, Quickbooks SAP, TAM, Ticketmaster, TruckMate, Xactly and dozens more.
For even more granular IT management and control, Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 offers:
- Fine-Grained Access Controls – to better enable Informatica Cloud administrators to define and implement role and group permissions and profiles.
- Delegated Administration – to enable customers and partners to easily provision and manage multiple Informatica Cloud tenants.
- Two-Factor Authentication – to enforce IP address restrictions such as enabling logins only from specific IP address ranges in addition to login name and password.
- Customizable Views – to enable users to define custom queries based on personal preferences and manage multiple cloud data integration tasks.
- Flexible Job Scheduling – to enable users to define blackout periods, such as non-business hours, to optimize performance and job processing.
- REST API – to enable devs and IT to launch pre-defined data integration tasks from an external source for event-based cloud integration.
One early adopter of Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 found the REST API especially useful for managing two-way, on-premise-cloud data integrations.
“Today we rely on Informatica Cloud to run thousands of data integration jobs a day to integrate our customer data,” said Mike Jones, a data warehouse analyst at Ingenuity Systems, which provides knowledge management services to the life sciences industry. “The REST API with Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 will allow us to deliver real-time data synchronization between production user management systems and Salesforce CRM in order to ensure new trial registrants are actively supported within 60 seconds.”
Informatica Cloud Summer 2011 is available as either SaaS, PaaS or IaaS, thanks to the company’s runtime agent technology.
In addition to Informatica Cloud, traditional Informatica platform customers can also take advantage of public or private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) deployment options. Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica Data Quality and Informatica Data Archive Cloud Store Option on Amazon Web Services (EC2 and S3) deployment options are also available. In addition, Informatica’s MDM is available to licensees to run on Amazon Web Services.
