As your organization looks to integrate your internal cloud applications and/or your product with clients’ cloud applications, you’ll likely find yourself weighing countless opportunities.

To help you suss out the best opportunities and prioritize them accordingly, we’ll break down several impactful cloud integrations you can build. 

But to start, let’s align on the definition of cloud integration.

What is cloud integration?

It’s the process of connecting cloud applications, typically via their APIs. Once connected, the cloud applications can share specific data freely with one another on a time based-cadence, all but ensuring they’re kept in sync.

Cloud integration includes two scenarios: Connecting the applications your organization uses to streamline internal processes, and connecting your product with clients’ applications to unlock additional value and use cases in your product.

In case your organization is only interested in one of the cloud integration approaches above, we’ll cover examples of both.

Related: Definition of cloud integration

Cloud integration examples

We’ll start by covering a few customer-facing examples and then go on to share a few internal integration scenarios:

Automate user provisioning 

As clients use your product, they’ll likely want to add and remove users frequently over time. After all, clients’ employees are constantly joining and leaving and their roles are often changing in meaningful ways.

To accommodate these changes effectively, you can integrate with clients’ HRIS solutions and build a data flow that syncs employee fields from these systems with your product. 

If an employee leaves, they’ll automatically be removed as a user in your product; if they join, they’ll automatically get added and, based on their department and job title, be assigned a specific role; and if their role changes, that’ll be reflected in your product and can—depending on how the client defines their roles—change their level of permissions.

Related: How to automate user provisioning

Enable clients to access the specific documents they need in your app

While it obviously depends on the nature of your product, your users will, in many cases, want to access specific types of files and documents without leaving your solution. For example, if you offer an HRIS solution, this can take the form of documents on your PTO policy; while if you provide an ERP system, this can be purchase order forms.

To help sync the appropriate set of client documents with your applications, you can integrate your product with clients’ file storage solutions. 

You can also incorporate additional measures to ensure that only the right personnel can access the documents. For instance, you can pick and choose the types of documents you sync and the users who can access them (via their role in your product).  

Related: The top software integration use cases

Add new leads to your clients’ CRM systems automatically

Say you offer a cloud solution that recommends specific leads to clients.

To help your clients uncover these leads and determine how they can engage with each, you can integrate your product with clients’ CRM systems and build a flow that not only adds the leads to the CRM systems but also syncs specific fields that empower clients to follow-up effectively. 

You can also add an additional step to save your clients time: A sync is only executed if a lead recommendation in your product is manually accepted by the client.

Route leads to reps seamlessly

The faster you can route leads to reps, the better equipped your reps are to respond sooner; and, as research proves, this allows them to convert more leads. 

To help facilitate a fast response time from reps, you can integrate your marketing automation system with your CRM and build a flow where once a lead reaches a certain score, they’re automatically routed to the appropriate rep in the latter system. 

You can also include specific, predefined fields as part of the integration—such as the company the lead is part of, their role, the content they’ve downloaded, the emails they’ve received, etc.—to help the rep respond intelligently. 

Related: Examples of application integration

Escalate tickets to engineering with ease

As your customer-facing employees receive and work on issues, they’ll likely come across several that require technical support from engineering. 

To help employees escalate these issues to engineering on time and in a way that’s easy, you can integrate the customer-facing employees' ticketing tool (e.g. Zendesk) with engineering’s (e.g. GitHub). You can then build a workflow where once a ticket is marked as escalated in the former, it’s automatically created in the latter. 

You can also build the sync to work bidirectionally. That way, your customer-facing personnel can learn the status of any ticket without having to ask their colleagues for an update.

Build the product integrations your clients and prospects need with Merge

Merge, the leading product integration platform, lets you offer hundreds of integrations by building to a single unified API.

The platform also offers maintenance support and management tooling for your customer-facing team to help provide reliable and high-performing integrations.

To learn more about Merge, and to hear how thousands of companies—from Drata to Navan to Gong—use our platform to scale their integrations, you can schedule a demo with our team.