How to Securely Connect your Internal ERP System to Salesforce

Need a fast, flexible, and secure infrastructure to connect your internal ERP system to Salesforce? Here is how.

The Challenge

No company wants to willingly expose their business-critical systems to the threats of the Internet via a shared and slow connection. Unfortunately, this creates a challenge for many organizations: how should IT teams securely connect their internal systems with external services?

Companies need infrastructure that is globally available and blazingly fast. With that in mind, hyperscalers’ platforms are typically the first option IT administrators evaluate. However, the public cloud offers very little flexibility and performance for VMs and makes it difficult to set up workloads exactly as customers want them.

Let’s look at an example of an organization looking to securely connect an internal ERP system with Salesforce. Nobody wants to expose their internal ERP system over the public Internet, and it is also relatively slow compared to private networks that offer much faster speeds.

The Solution: Salesforce securely connected to its own data center

One possible and elegant solution for this problem can be to use a VPN channel to connect a VM running Salesforce as a reverse proxy server. The only component needed would be a hosted virtual infrastructure dedicated to Salesforce.

To provide maximum reliability and performance, dedicated servers should be set up with high-performance SSD storage in a scalable, on-demand resource pool operating on a high availability cluster environment. A cluster like this vCloud can be directly connected to a company’s main data center via a VPN site to site permanent channel.

The result? Salesforce can run on high-performance hardware with a high-speed, low latency network and is securely connected via VPN to its own data center — which also guarantees GDPR-compliance.

The business continuity of the ERP solution can be easily improved by adding secure disaster recovery servers directly connected via a private network towards Salesforce. Therefore, data will be written directly to the own data center as well as the disaster recovery setup. This can be the first step towards a secure and geo-redundant environment.

Conclusion: Public cloud, IaaS, or both?

Requirements can change quickly, and IT departments must offer the right solutions for business needs when they arise. With Leaseweb, companies do not have to choose between the public cloud, like Azure, or an IaaS vendor. Instead, both platforms can co-exist within specific setups. By combining their strengths, companies can create a solution that gives them the best of both worlds for every use case. The challenge is to find a partner that offers a wide range of flexible services for cloud, hosting, colocation, and dedicated servers.

Leaseweb VMware vCloud Premium offers flexible IaaS solutions for various challenges and changing requirements, compared to rigid PaaS platforms.