What is cloud integration? Plus 5 powerful examples

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 with one another or with on-prem systems, typically via their APIs. Once connected, these applications can share specific data freely with one another on a time based-cadence.

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.

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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.

Benefits of cloud integration

Cloud integrations offer significant business benefits, but they vary depending on whether the integrations are internal or customer-facing. 

Here are the benefits that internal cloud integrations provide:

• Provides time savings: By enabling employees to avoid hopping between applications to find information or input data, they’re able to save countless hours over time that can be reallocated towards more valuable tasks

• Prevents human errors: Allowing employees to avoid entering in data manually lets them avoid costly errors, whether that’s using the wrong name in a candidate’s offer letter, including an incorrect price point in a purchase order, and so on

• Improves the employee experience: Giving employees time back and letting them perform less mundane, repetitive tasks—like entering in data manually—lets them focus on the work they’re more likely to enjoy and value

• Breaks down data silos: Letting employees access the data they need within the systems they already use empowers them to move faster, make better decisions, and avoid asking colleagues for information, saving everyone time

And here are the benefits provided by customer-facing cloud integrations:

• Elevates your close rate: By offering prospects the integrations they need, you’re—all else equal—more likely to win their business. Case in point: Gartner found that 44% of software buyers consider the “ability to support integration process” when evaluating vendors, making it one of the most important factors. This was also the top benefit (59%) when we surveyed hundreds of PMs and engineers for our State of Product Integrations report

• Improves your retention rate: Having customers adopt your product integrations enables your product to offer more valuable functionality. And, as our research shows above, this will likely improve your retention rate

• Helps you expand to new markets: Companies in certain industries, regions, and sizes are more likely to use a specific set of tools in a given software category. By integrating with the tools your target market tends to use, you’re giving them one more reason to invest in your solution

Cloud integration best practices

Like the benefits you can expect to realize, the best practices for building and maintaining cloud integrations largely depend on whether you’re considering internal or customer-facing integrations.

For internal integrations:

• Enable “citizen integrators” to build integrations. Non-technical personnel are often best suited to implement cloud integrations, as they can be most familiar with certain applications and business processes. That said, you’ll need to provide them training on using the 3rd-party integration solution (if you use one), enforce certain security and governance measures, offer pre-built connectors and automation templates to work off of, and more

• Assess your integrations’ performance on a recurring cadence. To better decide which types of integrations deserve additional investment and to make the business case for building more integrations, you should measure the KPIs of specific integrations every few months, whether that’s the time savings they provide, the errors they reduce, etc.

• Weigh the pros and cons of different methods of connectivity. You’ll likely find that vendors let you integrate data across systems via “bots”, or custom scripts, files (SFTP), or APIs. Each of these methods offer pros and cons, so you’ll need to carefully consider each before moving forward with any implementation

Related: API vs file-based integrations

For customer-facing integrations:

• Invest in monitoring infrastructure and processes. Your integrations will, inevitably, break. To help the right teams identify when this happens and empower them to diagnose and troubleshoot issues on time, you should invest in a monitoring tool (e.g., Datadog) and build workflows that notify certain channels in an app like Slack when issues arise

• Carefully consider the build vs buy decision. You may not want to implement and maintain product integrations in-house, as doing so is extremely resource and time consuming for your engineers. 

To help you decide whether to outsource customer-facing cloud integrations or keep them in-house, consider factors like the number of cloud integrations you intend to build over time, how customized they need to be, and how many engineering hours you can afford to allocate toward integration projects over time.

• Adopt an integration scorecard: By assessing each integration against a common set of criteria, such as the level of difficulty to build and maintain an integration, you can prioritize your integration builds effectively

Build the customer-facing cloud integrations you 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.

Cloud integration FAQ

In case you have more questions on cloud integration, we’ve addressed several below.

What is a cloud integration strategy?

It’s a documented plan that lays out how a company builds and maintains cloud integrations. This includes their goals from having cloud integrations, the tools they use, the employees that are involved, the capacity in which each employee is involved, and the processes in place for specific scenarios (e.g., handling a specific API error).

This plan can and should change within every organization, as it depends on the needs of the business and the resources available within the company—both of which evolve over time.

What is cloud application integration?

It’s a synonym of cloud integration. In other words, it’s also the process of connecting cloud applications with each other and/or on-prem systems to facilitate data syncs.

What is the role of a cloud integrator?

A cloud integrator is typically an individual consultant or a company that specializes in designing, implementing, and/or maintaining cloud-based integrations.

They’re typically contracted for specific integration projects and tasked with completing specific parts of those projects. For example, they can be tasked with building an API integration between a customer’s CRM and their ERP system to add newly-signed customers to the latter system automatically. Once that initial connection is built successfully, the engagement would end.

While not always the case, cloud integrators often specialize in specific systems, processes, industries, and/or company sizes to provide more valuable and lucrative integration services.

What are some cloud integration tools?

The tools you'd choose from depend on whether you’re looking to build internal or customer-facing integrations.

For internal cloud integrations, you can choose from integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solutions like Workato, Boomi, Mulesoft, Tray.io, and Celigo. Alternatively, or in addition to an iPaaS, you can choose a robotic process automation (RPA) solution like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, or Blue Prism.

For customer-facing cloud integrations, you can choose an embedded iPaaS like Paragon, Prismatic, or Cyclr; or you can choose a universal API solution like Merge, Codat, Finch, or Rutter.