Today there are thousands of cloud solutions on the market. Most of those have a subscription model allowing you to use the product for a monthly cost. Some cloud solutions have a free basic version allowing you to test the software following which you can upgrade to a paid membership based on various criteria such as number of users.

The advantage of those solutions is that they are accessible to companies of every size. Therefore, a company with two employees can access the same solutions as a company with 1,000 employees without having to make a large and potentially speculative investment.

Many companies use a number of business cloud applications on a daily basis, such as Salesforce CRM, Basecamp for project management, Sage for accounting, HubSpot for marketing automation, InsightSquared for Business Intelligence and Zendesk for managing customer service.

Data duplication

The disadvantage of using too many different applications is the problem of overlapping and duplicated data. This creates the problem of data duplication leading to additional work maintaining your data set. To avoid this problem it is important that the tools you are using are capable of exchanging and synchronising your data between applications. Leading providers of cloud solutions have developed APIs that precisely allow you to access data in one application to another, provided they are linked by an API.

What is an API?

An API (an acronym for application programming interface) is a set of commands, functions and software protocols that allow developers to create gateways allowing data exchange between applications. The API simplifies the developers work as they do not have to “write” integration code from scratch. The key to a successful API is that it gives you the endpoints that you need to create, read, update or delete.

The API is an interface of the software, it is something that the end user does not see and it is not an application in itself. They are not just for business systems. Applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and Candy Crush can communicate between each other using ApI’s and without need for intervention by the end users.

Data connectivity between all of your applications is the key to unlocking the potential of your company to grow exponentially. Company processes can be managed and be accessible entirely from the cloud.