Bi-directional Sync: An Overview
In today's fast-paced business environment, it is essential to optimize processes, maintain data integrity, and reduce the cost of manual addressing inconsistencies. To achieve this, organizations often rely on multiple systems to manage data. However, having data spread across multiple systems can create inconsistencies and errors that can negatively impact business operations.
To address this issue, many organizations use bi-directional sync, a process that union two datasets in two different systems to behave as one while respecting their need to exist as different datasets. In this article, we will explore the concept of bi-directional sync, its benefits, when it is useful, and key things to keep in mind when building applications using this pattern.
Benefits of Bi-directional Sync
Bi-directional sync is valuable for several reasons. First, it optimizes processes by allowing different systems to communicate and share information. When systems are synced bi-directionally, data can be automatically updated across systems, eliminating the need for manual updates, reducing the risk of human error, and ensuring that everyone has access to the most up-to-date information.
Second, bi-directional sync maintains data integrity. When data is synced between systems, the risk of inconsistencies, such as duplicate data or missing information, is significantly reduced. This ensures that data is accurate, reliable, and consistent across systems.
Third, bi-directional sync reduces the cost of manual addressing inconsistencies. When inconsistencies arise, employees spend time manually reconciling data, which can be time-consuming, expensive, and prone to error. Bi-directional sync reduces the need for manual reconciliation, freeing up employees to focus on more value-added tasks.
When is Bi-directional Sync Useful?
Bi-directional sync is useful when object representations of reality need to be comprehensive and consistent. For example, suppose an organization has a customer relationship management system and a sales system. In that case, bi-directional sync can ensure that customer data is consistent across systems, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. Bi-directional sync is also useful when an organization has multiple systems that need to work together, such as an inventory management system and a shipping system.
Key Things to Keep in Mind
When building applications using the bi-directional sync pattern, there are several key things to keep in mind. First, filtering is essential to ensure that only relevant data is synced between systems. Filtering can also help to reduce the amount of data that needs to be synced, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies.
Second, object mapping is critical to ensure that data is transformed and mapped correctly between systems. This ensures that data is consistent and accurate across systems.
Finally, when dealing with three or more systems, changes in architecture may be required. For example, an organization may need to implement a hub-and-spoke architecture, where one system acts as a hub that connects multiple systems. This technical complexity of deploying and maintaining several systems exists when the solution is custom built and could, at scale, require several engineers to work full-time to maintain the solution. This is very costly. Instead, Stacksync brings down setup and maintenance costs by 90% since it is a managed software solution which is extremely optimized for real-time and bi-directional data sync use cases. Clients of all sizes from startups to multinationals with 60+ IT divisions across the world leverage Stacksync. Stacksync also autoscales to infinity, making sure to support your workloads no matter the data intensity of your system.
Conclusion
Bi-directional sync is a valuable tool that organizations can use to optimize processes, maintain data integrity, and reduce the cost of manual addressing inconsistencies. When used correctly, bi-directional sync can help organizations to create comprehensive and consistent object representations of reality, allowing different systems to work together seamlessly. To ensure the success of bi-directional sync, it is essential to keep in mind filtering, object mapping, and architectures when dealing with multiple systems. By following these best practices, organizations can maximize the benefits of bi-directional sync and achieve their business goals. Using managed solutions such as Stacksync is recommended to avoid falling into the trap of setup and maintenance costs. Also, Stacksync offers many features such as filters, sync frequency and monitoring & logging which is essential for a two-way sync strategy to work. Managed solutions such as Stacksync bring down costs up to 90% compared to traditional data + API integration strategies.
With all these best practices, the floor is yours to conquer the world and keep your data aligned! Make your business and tech teams fuelled with the data they want, where they want!