Cloud computing. Containers. RESTful APIs. To IT pros, these are the sexy parts of enterprise IT. Middleware, however, has never been sexy. But it has always been essential, and as your organization moves to cloud-first IT strategies, your middleware must keep pace, and you have some decisions to make.
Middleware has been around for decades. From the message queuing (MQ) applications of the 1980s to the proprietary enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies of the 1990s, followed by the XML-based enterprise service buses (ESBs) of the 2000s—each one essentially moved messages from one app to another.
And then the cloud came along and changed everything.
By abstracting parts of the corporate network, the cloud changed the middleware game. Enterprises increasingly came to depend upon cloud-based SaaS apps, and wanted to integrate them with on-premises apps. Traditional middleware was simply not up to this task.
However, the cloud played an even more disruptive role, as integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) offerings hit the market. These cloud-based services delivered most, if not all, of the functionality that middleware had been providing.
Today, IT leadership faces a choice: Do you keep that old middleware in place or migrate to a cloud-based integration approach? As with most modernization vs. migration choices, the decision is far from black or white. Here are a few considerations to take into account, and some risks to consider.
Read the entire article at https://techbeacon.com/enterprise-it/migrating-cloud-dont-forget-your-middleware.
