08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 1/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

05 Oct 2022 Informatica Intelligent Cloud

Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and
Services Overview
Welcome to the first article in the Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS)
series, where we are going to run through its underlying architecture and the
main services this tool offers. Informatica is one of the most important data
integration vendors on the market; and the maker of PowerCenter, a well-
known ETL tool, amongst other products.

The continued growth in the use of cloud applications and the complexity of
effectively sharing and using business data across an organisation can lead
to a lack of integration between these applications and local ones, making
an effectively tested ad hoc integration solution such as Informatica Cloud a
necessity for your integration needs.

Why Informatica Intelligent Cloud Service?

Informatica Cloud offers iPaaS on the cloud that enables the integration of
disparate data by updating and synchronising specific business processes
and integrating data from different environments. Whether acting between
cloud applications and SaaS platforms, or interfacing with application
archives and databases on premise, Informatica Cloud provides the tools

needed to design a custom solution.
https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 2/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

Currently, IICS is ranked as a world leader for Enterprise Integration

Platforms as a Service according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, offering
benefits such as:

Increased agility: Process data integration tasks anywhere to keep up with

market changes and evolving business requirements.

Increased productivity: Build and run advanced integrations at scale, with

pre-built templates and reusable mappings, without coding!

High performance: Deploy and manage complex, modern workloads with

enterprise-grade performance and reliability.

Simplified integration: Process complex data integration mapping tasks

with a serverless Spark compute engine.

Cost optimisation: Select the most cost-efficient processing option based

on usage patterns and behaviour.

https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 3/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

Informatica Cloud is also an ETL tool and offers both batch and real-time
processing.
If you would like to get more hands-on with IICS, a 30-day trial can be
requested here.

Informatica Cloud Architecture

Informatica Cloud architecture has two main components, Informatica Cloud
and the Secure Agent:

Informatica Cloud

This is a bundle of hardware and software provided by Informatica; we can

utilise the resources of the cloud and run applications on it. Unlike
PowerCenter, there is no need to install any client applications on your PC, as
you directly access the applications through your browser.

You can find more details in the Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services section.

Secure Agent

This is lightweight software installed on a server behind the organisation
fi
https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 4/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog
firewall, providing connectivity between the cloud and the on-premise
system. The Secure Agent processes the data locally and securely; it also acts
as a medium to transfer data between the cloud and the organisation’s on-
prem setup.

Informatica Cloud automatically updates the Secure Agent software and

restarts it – organisations can focus on developing applications and do not
need to worry about administration. The Secure Agent runs three major
services on the server, listed below:

Data Integration Service: This runs batch jobs, executing data integration
jobs such as mapping, task, and task flow instances.

Process Integration Service: This runs real-time APIs, executing application

integration processes, connectors, and connections.

Common Integration Components: This executes shell scripts or batch

commands in a Command Task step of a task flow.

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS)

IICS provides various services that can used to manage the application, and
for developing and monitoring jobs. The screenshot below shows the services
provided by Informatica, depending on your licence:

https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 5/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

Administrator: Where you can download the Secure Agent and install it on
your server, as well as connectors to applications like files, databases, and so
on.

Data Integration:Used for developing batch jobs. The different tasks used for
developing batch jobs are listed below:

Mapping Task: Like PowerCenter mapping designer, this is used to define

the data flow logic to process the data.

Synchronization Task: This is used to synchronise data between the source

and target. It provides DML operations like insert, update, upset and
delete.

Replication Task: This can be used to replicate more than one object from
a source to a target. You can either use full load or incremental load
options to replicate the data.

Taskflows: You can combine other tasks and run them together in a flow, in
sequence, in parallel, or based on a decision.

https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 6/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

Monitor: as in PowerCenter, you can monitor the batch jobs developed in the
data integration. You can check running jobs, failed jobs, and successful jobs.
It also provides options to restart a job, stop a job, and download logs.

Application Integration: This is to develop Informatica Cloud real-time (ICRT)

APIs. The different types of assets that you can create are:

Process Object: This defines the structure of the request and the response
of the API; the structure of the temporary variables can also be defined
here.

Service Connectors: A service connector defines what actions can be

performed on an application. Before connecting to a third-party
application, a service connector should be defined.

App Connection: An app connection should be defined on top of the

connector. The app connection contains the credentials that the connector
uses to perform the action with third-party applications.

Process: To develop an API. This contains the business logic that the API
processes. Informatica Cloud automatically generates the REST and SOAP
APIs when you develop and publish a process.

Guides: Interactive screens can be developed using the guides where the
user can input and view the data.

Application Integration Console: You can monitor real-time processes and

schedule them; you can download logs and monitor server health.

API Manager: You can set policies on the API; policies include the IP
addresses from where the API can be accessed and the number of API calls
per minute (Rate Limit). You can also define the authentication mechanism for
each API using the API registry. The API group provides an option to group
logically related APIs into a single group, and the policies can be applied to
these groups.

Discovery IQ: This provides analytics on the number of jobs and the
i i ti W t k
https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/
f 7/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog
processes run in your organisation. We can get some key performance
indicators like the number of successful jobs, failed jobs, data volume, etc. We
can also download logs, analyse them, and generate some metrics from
them.

Operational Insights: This gives the status of Secure Agent services and
whether they are up and running or not.

Informatica Cloud Connectors

When we want to connect to an application (whether it is a file system, a
database, or a cloud application) we need a connector. Informatica Cloud 
has a lot of built-in connectors available for this purpose, but you need to
have the licence for them Some of the most used are File FTP JDBC
https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 8/13
08/01/2025, 19:35
have the licenceInformatica
for them. Some of the most used are File, FTP, JDBC,
Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

Salesforce, Snowflake, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Hadoop, Oracle, and

SAP.

There is no need to install any client applications. All the apps can be
accessed from the browser, where we can develop the task flows,
guaranteeing faster development and no loss of code if there’s a network
failure.

Identity and Access Management

IICS supports a variety of authentication mechanisms – password-based,
SSO-based, certificate-based, and token-based. Multi-factor authentication
mechanisms like trusted IP address ranges also enable stringent security.

For native password-based authentication, user credentials are hashed and

securely stored in the IICS host. Administrators of the customer organisation
can configure policies for password strength and rotation to suit their business
needs.

Administrators can also assign different roles to users to maintain the

principle of least privilege: users are only granted access to the capabilities
needed to perform their functions, allowing control over who does what, so
that some users are managing project and folder structure, some are

designing, some are running jobs, and so on. IICS provides predefined roles
to facilitate user role assignment for the most common needs, and custom
https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 9/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

roles for administrators to define new roles to meet the specific needs of their
organisation.

Cost Optimisation
When evaluating a cloud-native data management platform, enterprises
must take a close look at its data processing capabilities to maximise ROI,
optimise usage, and control costs.

As a next-generation intelligent Data Management Engine, IICS delivers

radical simplicity, improves user productivity, and provides elastic scalability.

IICS provides many features that help to reduce costs, such as Smart
Scheduling, Smart Cluster Management, and Storage Auto Scaling. As an
example, let’s see how IICS optimises costs with one of them:

In terms of job execution, lack of storage is worse than lack of nodes because
the former will result in job failure while the latter only causes slow
https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 10/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

performance. A lot of user intervention is required, usually for an on-premise

cluster. When a job fails with the disk error, the user will have to manually
reconfigure disks for each node and then restart those impacted jobs.
Besides, storage cost can be high: one t2.2xlarge with 1TB general-purpose
SSDs (EBS-backed) can cost around $1.5K per month. Storage Auto Scaler
constantly monitors the disk usage of each node and automatically attaches
additional storage volumes only to those nodes that require more storage.

The Informatica Data Management Engine eliminates user intervention

entirely and dramatically reduces storage cost.

Conclusion
This concludes the first article in this series about Informatica Intelligent Cloud
Services (IICS), in which we have given an overview of its architecture and the
services it offers, making it an easy-to-use tool, whether for the development
of new features or for access management.

In our next blog post we will look at a specific use case to demonstrate how
easy it can be to work with IICS, or more precisely with its data integration
functionalities with the collaboration of the Snowflake Data Cloud, and how
we can parse semi-structured data in JSON. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about how these technologies
and tools can help your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our global
team of certified consultants!

By Zakaria C, Darshankumar P 

https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 11/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

Share This Page

  

Looking for Something?

Search Here 

Recent Posts
Strengthen Your Data Governance with Data Catalog
Data Governance: The Key to Achieving Data Excellence
Why You Should Avoid Merging Business Areas in A Power BI Semantic
Model
Kafka Consumer with Protobuf
How to Optimise ODI Performance with the Right Knowledge Modules

Categories
Advanced Analytics
AI & LLM
Amazon
Big Data & Cloud
ClearPeaks
Cloudera
CoolThoughts
Data Governance
Enterprise BI
ETL 
Executive Analytics
https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 12/13
08/01/2025, 19:35 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) – Part 1: Architecture and Services Overview - ClearPeaks Blog

Google
Informatica
KNIME
Microsoft
Observation Deck
Oracle
Qlik
Snowflake
Tableau
Visualizations
Web & Mobile BI Development

https://www.clearpeaks.com/informatica-intelligent-cloud-services-iics-part-1-architecture-and-services-overview/ 13/13