Today, security and encryption have become a requirement to ensuring that inter-organizational data is safe for transport. Asking your IT security organization to manage the access and rights of potentially thousands of customers and suppliers is an expensive and challenging task. Outsourcing the communications gateway function to the cloud dramatically simplifies this activity while significantly reducing expenses.
As encryption keys expire there is a heavy maintenance burden associated with implementing and then maintaining a direct in-house gateway, especially as new trading partners are added or deleted. Implementing a direct connection to suppliers and customers often comes with a significant upfront expense in testing. Ensuring that security and firewall systems have been profiled correctly, credentialed and tested to allow for a third party to exchange data directly with your internal system can be a very manual process. Maintenance and testing of the infrastructure is not driven solely by adding or deleting trading partners, but by hardware and software changes that trading partners implement and then must retest.
The benefits of using a cloud-based gateway are numerous and include:
The DiCentral Cloud Communications Service allows you to support an unlimited number of connections and allows you to add or delete trading partners on demand without coordinating these changes with security maintenance windows in your infrastructure. DiCentral uses a clustering and load-balancing architecture to ensure continuous availability and high performance.
DiCentral’s enterprise-class cloud EDI platform offers a cost-effective alternative to in-house solutions. It is defined by six key traits: availability, security, scalability, adaptability, accountability, and reliability. In addition to B2B Cloud Communication Service, DiCentral’s EDI Outsourcing solution includes:
We wanted to offer our customers a seamless shopping experience, giving them easy access to all of our products in all of our divisions. To do this, we needed visibility across our silos of inventory. With a unified inventory system, we could not only improve our customer service and increase sales, we knew it would make a significant impact on the efficiency of our fulfillment process.
– Jill Barron, Vice President of
Supply Chain, Neiman Marcus Group