Stan Tanev

Field Level Encryption with Oracle Integration and OCI Vault

Integration platforms are often required to handle confidential information such as personal details, payment information or other data protected by compliance and regulatory standards such as HIPAA, GDPR, PII and PCI.

Various methods exist to protect data from unauthorized access while data is in transit and at rest. These approaches typically encrypt the entire payload. As a complementary approach Field Level Encryption has an important role to play by ensuring that only appropriately configured clients can read sensitive data fields. This approach also allows clients without the encryption keys to work with the non-sensitive data which would be impossible to do with a fully encrypted payload.

Although Field Level Encryption (FLE) is not natively supported in Oracle Integration (OIC) today, this blog will explore several options that will allow you to implement FLE with OIC. In this blog, I will present these options, discuss some guiding principles and showcase some sample implementations.

Process Excel files with OIC + Oracle Functions

In this blog post I will explore how we can extend the native capabilities of Oracle Integration (OIC) with Oracle Functions to process Excel files.

Although OIC can handle a number of file formats natively, .xlsx or .xls files need a bit of extra love.

The inspiration for this blog comes of the back of several customer enquiries into this subject.

The simple solution for most customers is to convert the Excel file formats to CSV and subsequently process them with OIC. I will use this approach here too but with a little bit of help from other OCI services such as Oracle Functions, an API Gateway and Object Storage.

A video of this demo is available here.

Triggering an OIC integration via OCI Events – the Oracle Functions Approach

In a two-part blog series I am exploring the available options in triggering an Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) integration whenever a resource state change occurs within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). One example of this event based pattern is the ability to trigger an OIC integration as soon as a file is uploaded to OCI Object Storage, thereby removing the need for any scheduled based integrations that rely on file polling.

In my previous blog, I provided some context and background on the OCI Event service and the available options that we have in triggering an OIC integration. Namely these are the OCI Notifications, Functions, and Streaming services. My previous blog also explored the first of these patterns, and detailed how this event based pattern can be achieved using the OCI Notification Service. In this follow up article I will cover how we can use Oracle Functions to achieve the same outcome.

Triggering an OIC integration via OCI Events – the Notifications Service Approach

Do you want to trigger an Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) integration as soon as a file is uploaded to OCI Object Storage?

This event driven approach allows you to respond to state changes in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in real-time, removing the need to poll Object Storage buckets on a predefined schedule. In a two-part blog series, I will explore how you can achieve this event-driven pattern with OIC. As the name suggests this blog will capture the Notifications Service Approach, while part 2 will provide a guide to using OCI Functions to achieve the same outcome.

Object Storage with Oracle Integration Cloud – Part 2

The first part of this series explored how to setup a connection between Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) and OCI Object Storage, and how to use Object Storage as a location to write files as part of an integration.

In this blog I will show you how to use Oracle Integration Cloud to consume objects from OCI Object Storage, including listing, reading and deleting those objects. To do this I have prepared an integration which showcases a common integration pattern; consuming a staged file in order to load data into an enterprise system. In this case, the integration will load financial data from Object Storage into Oracle’s ERP Cloud application. Specifically, this integration will:

List Account Payable (AP) Invoice files available on OCI Object Storage
For each source file that it finds in the cloud bucket, it will:
1. Read & transform the file to the format required by Oracle ERP Cloud
2. Upload the transformed file to ERP Cloud and trigger the required Import jobs in the application
3. Delete the now processed file from the OCI Object Storage bucket

Object Storage with Oracle Integration Cloud – Part 1

Over the past few years, in everything from personal photo storage to enterprise development there has been an incredible uptake of cloud storage buckets which provide a simple, low-cost mechanism for storing unstructured data. For much longer than that, there has been a need to consume, stage and produce unstructured data in enterprise integration scenarios. File servers accessible via protocols such as FTP/SFTP, etc. are commonly used to meet the staging requirements of traditional file-based integration use cases.

The practice of using an FTP/SFTP server alongside Oracle’s cloud integration platform – Oracle Integration Cloud (henceforth, OIC), is nothing new and is well documented.

In a series of upcoming blogs, I will explore how we can use Oracle’s cloud storage buckets (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Object Storage) instead of a traditional FTP server in cloud-based integrations. In this initial blog I will focus on: