Implementing ESB to keep your business young  

Imagine a creature that is born, grows, ages, and eventually meets its demise. Sounds like a human, right? Well, it’s also a fitting description of a business! But here’s the catch: a business has an advantage over us mere mortals. It can be rejuvenated much more easily. While we humans are still chasing the elusive fountain of youth, a business can always be revitalized. And here’s where the magic happens – by keeping its IT infrastructure young and sprightly, a business can steer clear of any bottlenecks that may threaten its growth. So, let’s dive deeper and explore the ways in which we can keep a business’s IT infrastructure in tip-top shape.

Young IT infrastructure characteristics

1. Ability to renew itself. It can quickly scale or replace outdated systems with newer, more effective ones that align with the current business goals.
2. Transmitting and processing information at lightning speed.
3. Adept at creating new neural pathways and integrating seamlessly with existing ones.
4. It can adapt to external changes at breakneck speed, ensuring that the business doesn’t become obsolete.
5. Perfect memory, akin to a detailed event logging system that records everything with ease.

Sounds like a dream, right? Sadly, reality often falls short of these youthful standards.

IT infrastructures don’t become heavy and poorly scalable over night. It’s a gradual transformation that happens as new systems and integrations are added to the mix.

To unlock the secret of eternal youth, we need to examine a real IT architecture example. Some companies are especially telling because they operate in a rapidly-changing market and must adapt to survive. In one such case, there was a structure where the product information was functioning in the following manner:

In this case, data goes through not one, but two additional systems and integrations, where it’s collected, processed, and transformed by systems that were never intended for this task. It made sense back in the day when there was only one website, but in today’s world, this approach falls short. The lack of mobility, flexibility, and speedy transmission of information is far from ideal. And this is just one classic example – there’s another ecosystem with point-to-point “star” integrations that’s equally problematic.

The rapid development of new connections is also troublesome in this instance. Each new system requires a lengthier and more time-consuming integration procedure; even minor modifications in systems or business processes necessitate large-scale and costly enhancements.

IT Infrastructure Aging characteristics:

• When the number of systems and integrations in the IT infrastructure exceeds a critical threshold. Take a company with 500 employees, for instance. It’s bound to have dozens of systems and hundreds, if not thousands, of point-to-point integrations that connect them all together. But with each new addition, the system becomes less flexible, less nimble, and more prone to errors;
• As the information path grows longer and more complicated, errors, losses, and distortions in data become more likely;
• If key business processes are still linked to outdated systems, it can be tough to update the infrastructure smoothly.

Eventually, some data blocks become set in stone, unable to change despite evolving business needs. It’s a complex problem, described by the “complexity curves” of changes in the monolithic architecture.

When it comes to integration support costs, the choice between service-oriented and monolithic architectures isn’t a big deal in the beginning. As long as the number of systems and integrations is manageable, both architectures can handle it. However, as the number of integrations grows and the connections in a monolithic architecture become more intricate, the difference in costs becomes more apparent.

As you can see from the graph, when it comes to integration support, service-oriented architectures are a lot more straightforward than monolithic ones. In a service-oriented architecture, the time it takes to support integrations grows in a linear fashion as you add more systems. However, in a monolithic architecture, the growth is more like a parabola – it increases exponentially with each new system added.

But here’s the thing: even if you think you’re using a service-oriented architecture, you might actually be dealing with a monolithic one. How can you tell? Well, have you ever made changes to one system, only to find that it caused problems in another? Or have you ever had to update a system, only to realize that it required extensive knowledge of all the systems related to it? If so, then you might have a monolithic architecture on your hands.

And that’s a problem. With a monolithic architecture, making changes to your systems becomes a lot harder. You end up spending more and more time just maintaining the existing infrastructure, instead of developing new things. To compensate, you might try implementing new systems or tools as quick fixes, but that only makes things worse in the long run.

So why does this happen? There are a few possible reasons:

• Maybe when you first built your infrastructure, you only cared about a few essential systems. But as your business grew, you had to add more and more systems to meet new demands, which the original architecture wasn’t designed for;
• Or maybe you thought about using a different architecture, but it seemed too expensive or complicated at the time, so you put it off until it was too late.

Either way, the result is the same: an aging infrastructure that’s holding you back from making real progress.

An ESB will keep your infrastructure young because of:

• Ability to adapt

There’s no need to start from scratch every time you want to add a new system or sales channel or connect with a new supplier. With an ESB layer in place, all you have to do is improve or create some new jobs, connect to the layer, and voila! No need to spend countless hours creating complex integrations between your existing systems. Plus, it’s a fantastic way to save time and money in the long run.

• The ESB layer – the superhero of information processing and transmission

Say, you’ve got your online store on Bitrix and three other websites where you sell your products. But when you update your prices, product descriptions, or stock balances, it takes ages for those changes to reflect across all channels. It’s like watching paint dry, right?

Once you implement it into your architecture, it becomes the driving force behind speedy data transfers, designed to handle even the heaviest of workloads. And the best part? It ensures that changes made to your product information are immediately reflected across all your sales channels without getting stuck in the middle. No more delays, no more headaches.

• Formation and response speed

Unlike point-to-point integrations, where development teams have to focus on implementing integration logic through the lens of each individual system, with ESB-based integrations, the development team can solely focus on business logic and transferring information between systems. This means you can form new connections in no time and get back to what really matters – growing your business!

The faster new integrations are formed, the quicker the company responds to external impacts using IT tools and the less time it takes to adjust its IT structure to new business processes.

• Memory

With the ESB layer, you can kiss your worries about information logging and storage goodbye! It’s like having a personal assistant that records everything that happens with your data, from product details to messages from your favorite marketplaces and even customer information. The bus takes care of message delivery and stores them until they reach their destination successfully. If something goes awry and the delivery process fails, the logging feature allows you to pinpoint exactly what went wrong and fix the problem in a jiffy.

So, once you implement an ESB, it will:

• collect all data about products, orders, prices, stock balances, customers, etc. from systems that are part of the company’s IT contour;
• combine and / or convert the collected data;
• transfer data both to internal systems and to online sales channels.

Whether you choose to keep things traditional or transition to an ESB, AINSYS can become a helping hand for you. AINSYS integration framework syncs data between every tool and platform your IT  team employs in their work, helping you get an accurate picture of your software. By leveraging ESB and AINSYS tools, any IT specialist and professionals with no coding skills can ensure that they are making the right decisions for their organization and keeping up with the ever-changing technology landscape.