Challanges and Best Practices in Third-Party Integrations

Third-Party Integrations are a necessity and a pain in the life of many businesses! Why? Because businesses use different applications that they need for different purposes – but they all need to connect and synced in such a way that there is no loss of data and overall functionality!

Now one may ask – Don’t you think these different applications do come with a slogan – seamless third-party integrations? Yes – they sure do! But if the technical landscape was so easy to deal with – everyone could have done and achieved everything!

Sometimes reality is quite different and complicated as it may not seem! And this is the same with Third-Party Integrations! Let’s understand the challenges that many face with Third-Party Integrations that make them one of the most critical things in the technical world!

Top Challenges and best practices for a better Third-Party Integrations

Compatibility Issues

Problem – Not all third-party services are going to be perfectly compatible with your current architecture stack. There can be problems in compatibility due to differences in technologies, data format, or protocols.

Best Practice – One should take their time before selecting the third-party service to handle the tasks. Make sure that it fits your projects and solutions stack and complies with the requirements for protocols and data formats. Leverage midterm solutions, or integration platforms, to control and facilitate integration. Document integration processes to ensure that architecture diagrams are kept clean.

Security Concerns

Problem – The flaws of integrating third-party services include the possibility of new security risks. The consequences of security threats like data getting hacked, unauthorized access and data leakage are quite visible.

Solution – Applying security measures when hiring third parties to for their services outside the organization is advisable. OAuth for authentication, encrypt your data and update the dependency frequently. Make it secure to have the security audits on frequent basis and do remember to follow the safe coding standards.

Performance Impact

 Problem – When not optimized, external services could greatly affect the working of your application. This can result in a negative user experience and high latency.

Solution – Supervise the effectiveness of partnerships. There is always a way that one can avoid this, below are ways to avoid such; caching strategies, asynchronous calls, and load balancing techniques. It requires performance management tools to give information that can help track the problems and their solutions as soon as possible.

Data Privacy and Compliance

Problem – The third-party provider services provide end-to-end services for handing off sensitive data from social media platforms and other applications, which creates problems in adhering to legal frameworks such as GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA.

Solution – Make sure that the providers respect regulations on the protection of data. Adopt the principles of data minimization, anonymization and restriction of the data processing operation. It is also advisable and correct to revise your data privacy policies sometimes.

Reliability and Downtime

Problem – The external services that may be incorporated in the application may sometimes go ‘offline’ or have a sloppy service.

Solution – Ensure you stick to laboratories with good SLAs as this helps one avoid stretching the supply chain. The failover provisions should be in place and there should always be some queuing systems in place if the specific function is lost. Ensure that the third-party service availability is good and monitor on circumstances that causes poor third-party service.

Integration Complexity

Problem – There are sometimes problems with integrating multiple third-party services, mainly the outcome becomes convoluted and is difficult to maintain.

Solution – Middleware or integration platforms should be used to handle and coordinate integration. Enshrine work and regulate document integration at the project with logical and accurate architectural drawings. This is called code review and should be done periodically, and documentation of the code should be done for the purpose of future uses and adjustments if necessary.

Vendor Lock-In

Problem – Outsourcing of a particular business function to a single third-party vendor has several disadvantages, among which vendor lock-in effect is an important one decreases options and versatility and raises dependency dangers.

Solution – Plan for modularity when you are designing your system. Make sure that it is easy to change from one provider to the other or eliminate a certain service. Monitor the emergence of the new providers and stay ready with an alternative plan.

Versioning and Updates

Problem – Third-party APIs and services change often; that is a problem because your application may no longer be compatible with them.

Solution – Maintain information about the changes in versions and modify the integration code, if necessary. To keep update changes well managed, one should use a version control system and automate testing procedures. Document which types of versions depend on other types of versions and what changes are made.

Dependency Conflicts

Problem – Most modern e-commerce applications depend on other libraries as well as frameworks. New features could bring changes to these dependencies and as often happens, a list of conflicts that contribute to instability.

Solution – The dependencies should be reviewed and updated frequently, and it is recommended to do compatibility testing often to address the issue as soon as possible. Set up CI/CD pipelines which will help in automatic testing and deployment.

Concurrency Issues

Problem – In the future, new features may increase the number of users the application serves at once or interactions occurring at the same time. If the application is not built to be able to support concurrent users and their interaction with this application, it is possible to obtain race conditions, deadlocks, and often crashes.

Solution – You need to make your application highly concurrent and the means to achieve this include load balancing, sharding and even the way you write your code so that it does not have race conditions or dead lock problems. Perform stress testing on the application to find out if it can handle high loads.

Security Vulnerabilities

Problem – I noticed that with the inclusion of new features there tends to be insecurity issues, which if attacked may result to system instabilities and crashes. It becomes critical to ensure new features are secure for an application that has users’ data in bulk such as using the e-commerce application to minimize application instability and loss of business reputation.

Solution – Have appropriate practices that should be followed to improve security and constantly assess the security situation. Employ practices like coding security, input checks, and penetration to have a clue about weaknesses and name them.

Configuration Errors

Problem – New forms tend to be accompanied by new form configurations. Slightly improper configurations are likely to make the application err or run with instability.

Solution – Introduce and maintain sound procedures for configuration management, extending to automation of setting validation and rigorous testing of new setting. Document your configurations and keep this documentation as clear and as detailed as possible.

Legacy Code

Problem – Some sections of the application could remain stagnant, that is, they have not been updated (this could be a legacy code issue). Incorporating additional features to a program results from rewriting the code; this is usually a difficult process that is marred by errors.

Solution – It is recommended to gradually replace the old code and carry out extensive tests during the incorporation of new functionalities. Document well to enable someone to follow up or update in future, especially where the code is already written. Expose and enact modern development practices of enhancing the quality of the code.

User Interface (UI) Changes

Problem – Introduction of new features often implies the changes of the User Interface. New UI features are more built-up compared to the ones removed and they take time to load. If UI changes are done poorly, it will produce a confusing UI and can cause new bugs in interactions and responsiveness.

Solution – user testing before applying changes in the UI and getting the feedback accordingly. Although the front end is clean and well-designed, it significantly improves its performance and makes sure that new features are as easy to use as they can be. Some important guidelines include – Refining the UI elements, updating them and adapting them according to the feedback received from the users.

Conclusion

Third Party Integrations are not at all a simple task! There are many complications that a developer must face while integrating two systems! But there are some proven best practices and solutions that can be used and there are also certain things that need to be taken care of while integrating such applications!

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Author Bio: Varixkumar Patel is the Founder and CEO of Covrize. With 20+ years of industry experience, he has a deep understanding of Tech Industry Operations. Varix has played a critical role in the growth of two of the Software Majors in Ahmedabad and is adhering to the same for Covrize.