Businesses in every industry are embarking on bold digital transformation initiatives to instantly connect everyone to everything. Innovative projects such as self-service apps for telehealth, remote education, e-grocery, flexible office apps, fintech, and automated compliance reporting provide exciting digital offerings to deliver faster collaboration between customers, employees, partners, applications, and data. To be successful, these projects require an integrated digital framework for rapidly connecting application endpoints seamlessly with trusted data through automation and user-engaged processes.

This paper examines the pros and cons of strategies for connectivity, from building multiple layers of APIs for every data source (sometimes called an “API-led” strategy), to using an integration platform that provides a unified collection of components to enable modern digital transformation.