What’s an Integration User and why the heck do I need one?
You’ve spent a lot of time and more than a little money implementing your new system.
Keep it running smoothly by reserving a license for a dedicated integration account.
An integration user is a licensed software account not tied to a specific employee. It’s used specifically to manage integrations between applications, such as the connection between your CRM and your accounting software or email marketing platform.
Routine data transfers take place under this account, including any custom APIs you paid to develop during your implementation.
Many companies will assign the integration function to a system admin or to a power user, but this is legitimately risky and potentially very expensive.
Of course, the downside of maintaining a dedicated integration user license is easy to recognize: You have to pay for it. It’s easy to write off another license as a “nice to have.” That seems frugal, when in fact it’s both costly and dangerous.
Here are the true costs of not maintaining a dedicated integration user license:
1. Eliminate a Single Critical Point of Failure
The only constant is change, and that definitely applies to staff. Employees not only leave for other opportunities or to spend more time with family, they also change roles or responsibilities, are promoted, demoted, or develop unexpected health problems that may keep them out of the office for an extended period—or permanently!
If you don’t maintain a dedicated integration user license, any time a key staff member changes for any reason—or simply updates their password—your business processes may be brought to a halt and an expensive emergency development effort required.
Data sources must be established to feed your key reports. If the user account that established those connections is disabled, or if their password or data permissions otherwise change, those reports will break. What’s worse, that breakage may not be immediately obvious, leading you to share bad or outdated data with clients or senior management.
Similarly, some kinds of automated workflows will also be invalidated if the account that established them changes permissions or goes away. If that is years after your implementation, there may be no one left who remembers how to rebuild them, leaving you with the time and expense of a duplicate development effort that could’ve been easily avoided.
2. Reduce Your Risk of Catastrophic Loss
To get around the issues above, some seemingly thoughtful organizations will tie their integration efforts to an admin account.
After all, there’s always an admin, right?
While that may be true, by necessity, admin accounts have access to your entire system, including all your sensitive customer data. By giving an integration full admin access, you’re giving that tool the ability to log in as any user, including the business owner. You’re giving it the ability to create or delete users, to delete records, and to reset passwords, which can lock everyone out of the system.
We live in a world where threats from malicious actors are not a fantasy. If any of the third-party applications integrated with your system were ever compromised for any reason, or if those applications simply broke, then tying your integration to your admin account would open up your entire business to fault or attack.
No one wants to send an email to their clients saying “We’re sorry. We didn’t take the necessary precautions to protect your data.” For the modest expense of one additional license, you maintain an extra layer of security between your data and the online threat vectors that are an all-too-real part of doing business in the 21st century.
3. Save Time
Data is constantly changed and updated. That’s part of the value of an integrated business system—real-time access to the latest information. In the absence of a dedicated integration account, it can be very difficult to determine how or why a record was updated.
Users often perform batch updates on records as a part of regular cleaning and maintenance. Those updates often trigger integrations with other applications, such as project management software, reporting, or marketing tools.
If an error occurs, or if a record ever requires additional scrutiny (on behalf of an unhappy customer, for example, or as part of an audit), it is almost impossible to identify root cause without a dedicated integration account.
Was the update user- or system-generated? Was it triggered by the code or by an internal process? If the record was handled improperly, why?
It may take hours of additional analysis to uncover an answer, if one can ever be found. You will very quickly spend far more than the cost of one additional license.
It’s Easy.
Perhaps the best reason to dedicate one license to an integration user account is that it’s easy to set up and maintain. You simply create a group email address, such as “zoho@mycompany.com”, and add internal and external users as necessary.
If staff changes, simply remove them from the group and update the password. Simple!
If you’re still not sure…
Don’t make the final decision now. Try it for a time on the understanding that we don’t make the recommendation frivolously.
In our experience, you’ll quickly come to understand why the integration account is so important and why we strongly recommend it to all out clients.
