iPaaS

iPaaS is the cloud answer to what used to sit in your own data centre as an enterprise service bus. Instead of running central middleware yourself, you rent the integration layer as a service. The gain is less about technology than about pace: a connection that takes weeks to build in-house is live in an afternoon through an existing connector.

Two designs compete in the market. Cloud services such as Zapier, Make or Workato run on someone else's infrastructure and bill by usage. Self-hosted platforms such as n8n run on your own servers and cost operational effort instead of usage fees. Past a certain volume the maths tips towards the second option, because cloud pricing scales with the number of executions while server costs stay largely flat.

For the DACH mid-market a second point applies. With an iPaaS, all connected data passes through the integration layer, including personal data. If the provider sits outside the EU, you need a defensible legal basis for the transfer and a data processing agreement that covers the actual data flow. This is the most common reason companies with sensitive customer data end up running the integration layer themselves.

When choosing, the total connector count matters less than three plain questions. Is there a dependable connector for the two or three systems that actually matter? What happens when a flow breaks mid-processing, and how do you find out? And how do you get back out if the platform changes pricing or terms? Almost nobody asks the third question before rollout, and it is the most expensive one.