Overview of connecting CIC to your business ecosystem

Cleo Integration Cloud (CIC) moves data between the two halves of your business: the trading partners, customers, suppliers, and marketplaces outside your organization, and the backend systems inside it — ERP, WMS, CRM, databases, and file systems, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.

This section explains how to connect CIC to both sides of your business ecosystem.

Connection building blocks

Most file-based integrations in CIC use two objects:

• Endpoint: Defines how and where CIC accesses data.
• Data Flow: Defines the movement of data between endpoints.

Cloud Connectors work differently. Instead of using Endpoints and Data Flows, they connect CIC directly to applications such as NetSuite, Salesforce, and Shopify.

Common connection paths

• Connecting to partners: Configuring CIC to exchange files with a customer or trading partner using the protocol they support. This is one step in partner onboarding. See Connecting to Partners.
• Connecting to your backend: Connecting CIC to your internal applications, file systems, databases, and cloud applications. Depending on the type of system, you might use file-based integration, database integration, or a Cloud Connector. See Connecting to your Backend.

If your backend sits behind a firewall

CIC cannot directly access systems inside a private network, and you should not have to open inbound ports to allow access. Instead, you install the CIC Agent on a private server and reference it in CIC as an Access Point. The Agent opens an outbound, mutually authenticated connection to CIC and proxies traffic in both directions.

Which connections require an Access Point depends on the type of backend system. See What is an Access Point? and What is the CIC Agent?.