CLOUD INTEGRATION AS A SERVICE
FOR UNIT4 FINANCIALS BY CODA
Putting integration at the heart of your Cloud Migration
Software integrations are a critical element of any successful Unit4 Financials by Coda migration to the Cloud but are far too often overlooked or relegated to an afterthought. This is why Level8 developed our ‘Integration as a Service’ concept for businesses making the move to Unit4 SaaS.
The migration of the core platform can, for obvious reasons, take the limelight in Cloud project plans. However, without proper consideration of existing integrations, and a method for keeping them live and fully operational post-migration, your Cloud journey will soon become one defined by the disruption caused to the business.
Level8 already provide ‘Integration as a Service’ for a number of customers, several of whom have already made the move to Unit4 SaaS. Our services work alongside Unit4 SaaS to deliver a hosted integration platform.
This service supports several hundred integrations written by Level8 and processing data every night – it’s fair to say Level8 integrations are loading millions of transactions per day to installs of Unit4 Financials by Coda across the customer base.
The challenge: Achieving Coda integration in the Cloud
When it comes to developing and implementing integrations with Unit4 Financials by Coda, Level8 has all the skills and experience necessary, while Coda has a robust and extensive API. This API is where Unit4 Financials by Coda development begins – Unit4 R&D then build the web screens that you see as part of the Coda product on top of the API.
Level8 use this same API as Unit4 (wrapped in a different licence model), which provides around 99% of the function that is available in the screens. This means if something can be done via the screens, we can do it via the API as well – so, the answer to “Can you do X?” is always.. “Yes!”.
The API makes many hundreds of endpoints available. Our people have been using these for over 20 years – we know which ones to use in a given situation, and importantly, how to use them.
The final piece of the puzzle then is how to achieve this slickly and with minimal disruption in the Cloud…
Leveraging the power of the Level8 Portal
We make these integrations available and manage them via the Level8 Portal – our own proprietary browser-based integration portal. The Level8 Portal delivers reliable and supremely functional Unit4 Financials by Coda Cloud integrations through:
- Viewing of in flight ETLs as well as historic ones.
- Supporting ‘Ad hoc’ starts of ETLs e.g. where data arrives late.
- Screens for self-maintenance of any mapping data required during processing.
- Standard reports produced (tailored for each ETL) and automatically emailed to defined recipients.
- ‘Wake on file landing’ utilities that can automatically run interfaces when files arrive – this can be useful for large amounts of data where file arrival is uncertain, but processing time is critical.
Providing secure integrations you can trust
Security has to be a primary concern for any organisation embarking on a Cloud migration, something the specialists at Level8 never lose sight of. The Level8 Portal has been developed with data security at the forefront of the brief and delivers a platform customers can trust and rely on:
The Level8 Portal is penetration tested and secure for use via the public internet.
Built-in security for file transfers – SFTP file pulls and pushes can be authenticated with user/password and also SSH keys/certificates.
For the data itself, PGP signing/verification and encryption/decryption is built into the framework.This encryption also supports key rotation to provide resilience for keys expiring. Level8 manage the certificate renewal process (e.g. registering new keys with counterparties), so you don’t have to.
Level8 offer full support for API-to-API communications to provide secure real-time functionalities, and even wrapping such API-to-API pipes up, so they appear like traditional batch interfaces.
Just some of the Level8 customers we’ve helped through our Integration as a Service approach…
Integration as a Service – How it works
A service configured to customer requirements
We can offer IaaS from 1 data feed upwards on shared servers.
There are four components to the cost
- Building the ETL pipe for the data feed [one off cost]
- Hosting costs – i.e. machine time & space [annual repeat cost]
- Managed costs – i.e. installing & looking after the server [annual repeat cost]
- ETL pipe maintenance – fixes, small changes, upgrades for new versions of Coda, database and so on. [annual repeat cost]
Pricing structure
For all of this we can offer menu pricing – based on the ‘T-shirt’ S,M, L,XL principle.
‘Small T-shirt’ would apply for feeds of transactions posting to the ledger where the data already has Coda intelligence built in (i.e. account codes, references, double entry) we can offer menu pricing for ‘everything’ – a full turn key solution.
This can also include basic mapping & conditional logic.
Where the incoming data is more complex, we start to move up the sizes. Size XL is reserved for the most complex ETL pipes e.g. with interim processing steps.
This is enabled by a generic framework we use where the small and medium T-shirts sizes can be done with configuration only.
SMALL
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MEDIUM
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LARGE
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XL
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Service hosting
Menu pricing is for shared server hosting – this would be in a private data centre.
For customers preferring a dedicated server we can offer private data centre hosting on Azure, AWS, GCP.
As standard the service includes DR failure & backups (immutable, off site) together with strong RTO & RPO numbers.
Request your tailored consultation
Cloud integrations and interfacing: One size does not fit all
Specific needs. Tailored approach. Specialist consultation. Bespoke solutions.
Pricing by requirement
Scalability
Outsourcing and internal bandwidth
Contact us
0203 815 7957
contact@level8.solutions