It usually begins harmlessly: the CRM system used throughout the company for administration of contacts and opportunities is too rigid for a marketing campaign quickly developed for a leading trade fair. Even if it were technically doable – there are no provisions in the budget for the adaptation. Once there was a time when vocational trainees would have been put to work sorting through stacks of business notes and filling out endless spreadsheets, but the marketing departments now take a different path. The cloud has fast help for little money: customer management has become a sterling example of SaaS services, featuring salesforce.com as its most prominent protagonist. In just a very short time, the access has been activated and the lead management for the trade fair campaign has taken its position at the starting line.

Data integration in the cloud – all of a sudden

SaaS applications are entering large companies in great numbers, mostly in response to emergency situations. As a rule, they move in quietly under the radar of the IT department and its enterprise architectures. Once a business development becomes dependent on the infusion needle of the new software, further application cases sprout quickly. Associates import, script, and format manually all of the master and movement data required. The business department quickly capitulates in the face of the manual labor with the enormous tables – and disingenuously asks the CIO for an interface to the company’s own applications. Before they know what has hit them, the people in the IT department are suddenly confronted with two challenges. First, an automatic data exchange which takes into account the loose coupling between the company’s own IT systems and cloud services must be organized on short notice. In the long term, on the other hand, the integrity, consistency, and transparency of the company’s data will be put at risk if the new data reservoirs in the cloud are not aligned with the data architecture. Achieving this means expanding the concepts for data classification, master data management, and service level management to include the new paradigms of software use. The IT architecture would do well to take an aggressive stance in preparing both tactical and strategic concepts for the hybrid extension of the application landscape into the cloud.