Key Design Considerations

When designing an integration, there are several key considerations that can greatly impact its success. These include Performance, Security, Reliability, Scalability, and Maintenance.

Think critically about which considerations are most important and how each of these impacts your bottom-line constraints (cost, time, resources) and how you can achieve a balance that aligns with both the immediate needs and long-term goals of your integrations.

Understanding Performance of the integration means considering how well your integration can handle data exchange and processing tasks under expected and unexpected conditions.

How large are the messages and what are the expected average and peak message volumes?

Reliability of an integration means considering how to build resiliency to disruptions and how to respond and recover from unexpected issues (e.g., connectivity errors, bad data, etc.).

What kinds of failures are most likely to occur and how can the integration continue to function against those different scenarios?

Scalability is about designing integrations that can grow to accommodate increasing demands or be easily repeatable for future implementations.

Which aspects of your integration may need to be expanded or replicated in the future?

Security is about safeguarding data against threats and how risks may be mitigated.

Should data access be controlled through authentication and authorization?

How can data transmission be secured to protect data confidentiality and integrity?

Maintenance involves planning for the integration’s ongoing support and adaptability.

Can the integration be designed to ease troubleshooting and maintenance?

How easy to use is the integration? Is there documentation for collaboration?