Over the past few years, business leaders have been the primary drivers of technology change, including making decisions to adopt new applications in the cloud, mandate a cloud-first strategy, offer new capabilities with an API-first strategy, and provide new applications to end users on mobile first.

There are significant benefits to these cloud decisions because they decrease time to value, lower costs, and make it easier for organizations to experiment and innovate. But there are consequences as well, chiefly in the complexity of learning how to integrate applications and exchange data across a decentralized architecture that is largely driven by autonomous development decisions.

This IDC White Paper answers the following questions about the need for hybrid integration: