With Digitalization truly underway, Enterprises of the Future are required to reinvent themselves to ensure that they stay competitive. Business Integration with EDI is becoming more important to ever for an organization to be able to scale its business networks rapidly. Along with this, they need to be able to execute rapid changes to their EDI operations to ensure that they stay up to date with the users’ demands while still maintaining the automation, reliability, and security of enterprise-class EDI operations.
The Business Challenge
To battle the challenges of low reliability, security and inflated costs our experts came together to define a scenario where enterprises can leverage existing B2Bi infrastructure along with Next Generation technologies to enable business networks.
Technologies Used
- Amazon S3
- Amazon Glacier
- Google Drive (Gdrive)
- Google APIs
- Google Mail (Gmail)
- IBM B2B Sterling Integrator
The technical scenario uses Sterling Business Processes and Automated Java Tasks to pick up EDI files (Random Formats) from Gmail. The EDI file is then immediately archived into Amazon S3 and is also sent to the Sterling Integrator Translator Java Task for conversion into XML.
The converted XML file then gets pushed into Google Drive using Google’s APIs and is picked up by a Sterling Java Task once again to load back into the Back-End EDI system. In case of a failure in the processing of the EDI file, the archived EDI file is pulled back from Amazon S3 by Sterling Integrator and re-processed.
The archived EDI files will be moved to Amazon Glacier after a certain time period, to ensure longer storage of the EDI files at much more reduced prices.
The Enterprise Advantage
Large Enterprises with hundreds of Trading Partners struggle to find ways to process their EDI documents in a reliable, secure and low-cost manner. Through this scenario, an enterprise can achieve the following advantages,
- Low cost for archival through Cloud-based Amazon S3 Storage
- Archival Costs can be reduced by archiving files to Amazon Glacier automatically after defined time intervals
- Reliable EDI process with automatic (or) web GUI based EDI re-processing
- Ability to create Web/Mobile Dashboards for visibility into the EDI processing using the Amazon and Google APIs
- Enterprise-Class Security provided by Google and Amazon for your EDI documents
What is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), provides developers and IT teams with secure, durable, highly-scalable object storage. Amazon S3 is easy to use, with a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. With Amazon S3, you pay only for the storage you actually use. There is no minimum fee and no setup cost.
Amazon S3 can be used alone or together with other AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon Glacier, as well as third party storage repositories and gateways. Amazon S3 provides cost-effective object storage for a wide variety of use cases including cloud applications, content distribution, backup and archiving, disaster recovery, and big data analytics.
Glacier Storage = The Longer The Cheaper
Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost storage service for data archiving and online backup. Customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for infrequently accessed data where a retrieval time of several hours is suitable.
The Cost Charts
With no setup, costs involved the costs for each of the services used above are insanely cheap for an enterprise and as the EDI processing numbers go up and the archival duration increases the prices seem even more reduced.
Google APIS
| Service | Setup Cost | Free Range | Premium range |
| Google Drive API | No | 500,000 Requests/Day | No, Can request for more |
| Google Mail API | No | 1000,000,000 | No, Can request for more |
Amazon S3 and Glacier Storage
| Storage | Standard | Reduced Redundancy | Glacier |
| First 1 TB | $0.03 per GB | $0.024 per GB | $0.01 per GB |
| Next 49 TB | $0.0295 per GB | $0.0236 per GB | $0.01 per GB |
| Next 450 TB | $0.029 per GB | $0.0232 per GB | $0.01 per GB |
| Next 500 TB | $0.0285 per GB | $0.0228 per GB | $0.01 per GB |
| Next 4000 TB | $0.028 per GB | $0.0224 per GB | $0.01 per GB |
| Next 5000 TB | $0.0275 per GB | $0.0220 per GB | $0.01 per GB |
Amazon S3 and Glacier Requests
| Requests | Price |
| PUT/COPY/POST/LIST | $0.005 per 1,000 requests |
| Glacier Archive and Restore | $0.05 per 1,000 requests |
| Delete Request | Free |
| GET and all other requests | $0.004 per 10,000 requests |
| Glacier Data Restores | Free |
