Integration and hybrid landscape

You’ve probably heard the word hybrid before. Currently, this word is typically used to refer to a car with a combination of a conventional combustion engine and an electric motor. Such a car can make the most of two fundamentally different technologies. The word is also used in a similar sense in the IT world. This is currently divided into IT systems that are physically located in the customer’s environment, i.e. IT environments installed and operated on their own infrastructure. The second part of this world represents IT solutions in the Cloud. These two environments are very different and each of them, as with automobiles, has its own advantages and specificities. If a customer uses part of the IT systems in their own environment and part of the IT systems in the Cloud, we call such an environment a hybrid landscape.

We are currently encountering hybrid IT landscape more and more often with customers. The customer’s requirement is then always the same, namely to connect the two environments so that it works as one. In such a landscape, the connection between the on-premises and cloud worlds always presents a very interesting challenge.

One way to connect such a hybrid landscape is to use one of the tools from the SAP BTP product family. Since all SAP BTP products are cloud tools, this is an obvious choice for connecting cloud systems. However, the SAP Integration Suite product from this product family can effectively connect all the IT systems that the customer has installed and running “at home” in addition to the Cloud. Thus, when set up correctly, it can securely and efficiently link these two worlds into a single entity.

For this purpose, it is possible to use a special SAP Cloud Connector application. Cloud Connector (part of SAP Connectivity) is a small local software component that allows you to create a secure connection between your SAP cloud environment and your on-premises environment.

Cloud Connector is typically installed locally in a demilitarized zone of the customer’s IT environment. The role of the Cloud Connector is to establish a secure connection between the local network and the applications in the Cloud. However, this secure connection is mainly used to communicate from the Cloud to your local network.

In the integration area, however, it is also necessary to consider communication in the opposite direction, i.e. invoking communication from the local system to one of the applications in the Cloud environment. In this case, you also need to set up a connection from your local network to the SAP BTP system, typically using a proxy server or other network element.

So if you are thinking about a secure and modern Cloud solution for data exchange between internal business applications and applications in the Cloud, we have the right solution for you.