This article provides key highlights from our ‘Introduction to DIH’ webinar series. For the complete information on the new DIH concept and architecture we invite you to register to watch the full webinar on-demand here.

Data nowadays is taking center stage in the business world. Decision-makers have realized that they need data to generate better outcomes. Data is knowledge and knowledge is power, as demonstrated by the rise of ‘digital-first’ organizations like Google, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon.

In the midst of a global pandemic, the importance of data and the innovation it drives has never been greater. According to Forrester, firms with advanced technology-driven innovation practices are growing 3.6x faster than the industry average.

One of the biggest roadblock for organizations looking to compete with these digital-first innovators lies in conventional IT architecture, which has evolved in a different world than the one we’re now in. The main issue is that conventional architecture tends to be product- and vendor-centric (think ERP, CRM and core banking systems) – each system comes with its own database, leading to information silos. Conventional architecture has other issues too, mainly around efficiency, scalability, performance and cost. This created a hard ecosystem to innovate in.

A modern organization looking to achieve a 360 degree view of its customers requires a more modern and holistic approach to data management. It needs exactly what a Digital Integration Hub (DIH) can offer.

What exactly is DIH?

What is a DIH? It’s an IT architecture that decouples digital applications from legacy systems of record. It uses event-based integration, which sees any change in the underlying data being pushed to the DIH, in essence creating a copy of that data in a modern, high-performance data store that can better serve your users, applications and business as a whole. Microservices and APIs can then be built as layers atop the DIH, allowing you to launch new services and applications far more efficiently, all while retaining legacy infrastructure.

The GigaSpaces architecture of Smart DIH deserves an article of its own, which is why we wrote one. Check it out here.

The resilience concern

As an enterprise-grade system, resilience is a key concern for DIH, so GigaSpaces has worked to attack this problem from all angles.

• The cluster is highly available – every partition has a back-up partition, resulting in 99.999+% availability.
• Local persistence is enabled and completely synchronized for each partition.
• Smart DIH also offers remote asynchronous persistence, using mirrored data storage.
• Logical cross region replication is enabled with our WAN gateway.

Deployment flexibility

Because the DIH conceptually doesn’t rely on any specific cloud technology or service, it is completely compatible with all clouds. This makes the solution truly portable, deployable on-premise, in-cloud, or in a hybrid topology.

A common topology sees DIH cluster in the cloud, with operational, B2C digital, B2B and other applications served out of it, while the majority of the systems of record reside on-premise. The deployment flexibility that DIH offers means that the topology of your system is entirely up to you, from the super simple to the most complex, hybrid, multi-region, data-segregated deployment imaginable.

GigaSpaces’ Smart DIH can be also deployed across multiple clouds. You can have your developers working on AWS, your analysts working on Google Cloud, and your operations teams working on Azure.

Three Smart DIH use cases

What do Smart DIH outcomes look like in the real world?

Swedish digital bank Avanza can now launch new applications and services in a matter of days – unheard of for a financial institution. They also offer the most advanced services on the market, such as automatic, two-minute loan approval and the ability for customers to switch from another bank in just a few clicks. The superior customer experience they offer has won them the award for the most satisfied customers for the last 11 years running.

Before deploying DIH, French investment bank Société Générale lacked a single source of truth, used multiple APIs to access multiple data sources, and had infrastructure that supported a relatively low availability figure of 99%. After the deployment of Smart DIH availability rose to 99.999%, the number of applications more than doubled in less than three years, and 20 million event triggers are now processed daily.

Another bank recently approached GigaSpaces with three requirements: They wanted to move to the cloud while retaining their on-premise infrastructure, they wanted to adhere to challenging Open Banking regulations, and they wanted to be able to launch digital applications and services quickly. Smart DHI comfortably ticked each of these boxes, and GigaSpaces created a hybrid typology that has reduced the workload from the mainframe and allowed the first service to be deployed within just three months.

The world is transforming. So must your business.

Today’s world is data driven. There’s no getting around that fact, no matter your business’s size, shape, age or industry. Data will only be getting bigger and complex, so modern businesses find themselves at a fork in the road (not really):

1. Ignore the need for digital transformation, or
2. Step up to the challenge and gain a major competitive edge.

The word ‘transformation’ may sound intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be so. By using a solution that bends to your needs, you won’t need to leave existing systems behind. In fact, the modernization of legacy systems often represents the best way forward.

Let the DIH architecture act as the manager, translator and enhancer of your legacy data – the middleman that enables digital transformation in its smoothest, most seamless form.

This article provides key highlights from our ‘Introduction to DIH’ webinar series. For the complete information on the new DIH concept and architecture we invite you to register to watch the full webinar on-demand here.