Organizations that aim to offer superb digital services usually face a number of technical challenges. In a recent GigaSpaces webinar, we discussed these difficulties and also covered solutions that overcome these challenges – but we’re getting away with ourselves, let’s list the data-related difficulties that plague organizations.

Challenges in providing high-performance real-time applications

A common issue facing many organizations that offer digital services is how to obtain a consistent view of their entities, when the information is spread among multiple data sources. Think of a retailer who must provide accurate information on the fly to a shopper who will abandon their cart if the product, shipping, billing or inventory information is not 100% up to date. The organization must pull the relevant info from the multiple databases that store all this information, and integrate it in no time, to be able to provide the shopper with complete and correct information to be able to complete their purchase. 

This data may be stored in different formats, in legacy, on-premises systems and on the cloud, in structured or unstructured formats. Often, these legacy systems were not designed to sustain the availability and performance SLAs that new digital services require, leading to slow digital app performance. Solutions such as ETL and local caching limit the freshness of the data, which means that consumers will have to wait for their shopping cart to display the correct items and prices – and these days wait times are measured in milliseconds, longer wait times are not tolerated. This delay means that stale data may be displayed – obviously an unacceptable experience that can result in lost sales and negative customer reviews. 

For the organization’s developers who are under constant pressure to release new services, having the flexibility to use SQL, REST, low-code and full code regardless of architectural constraints is crucial. Without the ability to develop digital services using the tools and frameworks that are most efficient for them, they will not be able to meet deadlines, resulting in longer development and deployment cycles, and in certain cases, an inferior product. Developers faced with creating top-notch services that require multiple interactions with siloed systems have additional challenges that complicate the data architecture and development process. All these factors increase time to value for the organization. 

The foundations of an effective solution: a Digital Integration Hub

Fortunately for organizations that face the issues described above, a proven solution exists: a Digital Integration Hub (DIH). This architecture decouples digital applications from the systems of record (SoRs), and aggregates operational data into a low-latency data fabric. It provides a decoupled API layer that effectively supports modern applications.

As described by Gartner, a DIH provides “low-latency and high-throughput API- and event-based data access, by aggregating and replicating multiple application sources into a data management layer that synchronizes with the applications.” Benefits of a DIH include “scalable, 24/7 data access, reduces workloads on systems of record (SORs) and improves business agility.”

Unlike a data lake, which primarily stores unstructured data and is usually dedicated for analytics, a DIH is designed to handle transactional data. Data lakes usually rely on batch processing, and while a DIH can incorporate batch processing it uses event-driven architecture. A DIH incorporates: event-base streaming, which continually processes available data points, and Change Data Capture (CDC) which polls the transaction log and changes such as inserts, updates, and deletions and delivers them in real-time to downstream systems or processes. CDC ensures that data remains synchronized across different systems, and reduces latency between the original data source and the data processing components, offering a highly efficient way to move data across a wide area network – perfect for the cloud. CDC ensures that data in multiple systems stay in sync, which is critical for time-sensitive decision-making in a high-velocity data environment.

DIH: Build or Buy

Organizations may try to build a data hub solution on their own, having decided that a DIH is the way to power real-time workloads with continuously fresh data and to assure ultra high performance. Many organizations find this initiative to be far more complex than when they first undertake this effort. Integrations between numerous components are not always smooth, and skill gaps become evident as personnel must assume responsibility for new components that interact with their systems. Some of the challenges they face include: 

• Integration challenges: difficulties with integrating various data types and achieving data replication 
• Skill shortage: teams often lack expertise in real-time data environments (data consistency, performance, latency)
• Organizational hurdles: Getting multiple teams with differing domain expertise to work together
• Runaway costs: ensuring that you have the right tools and skill sets in place, and have a hand on the 
• Maintenance and support: keeping all the component and the solution as a whole up to date, without requiring downtime for each update and checking to ensure that software updates do not negatively impact other components 

Smart DIH: Shorten time to value with an off-the-shelf platform

Since the challenges in building a DIH are multifold and often are not apparent until the process has begun, organizations can shorten time to value with an off-the-shelf DIH platform. A pre-built platform can save months of piecing together various components that often require time-consuming customizations, freeing your teams to create and improve your product offerings. 

GigaSpaces Smart DIH is a proven solution whose capabilities far exceed those of a typical data hub. Smart DIH is powered by a high performance Java machine data store, that assures ultra high performance – even during peak demand. It offers developers a wide selection of familiar protocols such as SQL, REST, GraphQL and developer tools such as Low code options, Java, C# and more, that gives developers the flexibility to quickly deliver new offers. Smart DIH powers real-time workloads with continuously fresh data, offering organizations a real-time unified data view that empowers more accurate decision making. And let’s not forget the 5 nines availability, so that you can be assured that all your users can always access all this fresh data.

A proven DIH such as Smart DIH offers a future ready, scalable solution, since you can easily add additional business domains to support growing operations. This secure, established solution consolidates data from multiple sources such as SAP, Snowflake, CRM, etc. with a proprietary, Kafka-based API. Smart DIH offers 24/7 availability and ultra-fast performance. 

Last words

Delivering scalable, high-performance applications that empower operations with a real-time unified data view is a considerable effort for an organization. An out of the box digital integration hub powers organizations with the ability to assure ultra-fast performance – even at peak demand. An established DIH gives you the flexibility to quickly launch highly demanding real-time apps easily, at scale and cost-effectively, shortening time to value.