The integration with SITS:Vision enables applications and reference data to be imported from SITS:Vision. For example, applications created in SITS:Vision are imported to Admissions for decision making and offer tracking and then exported back to SITS:Vision for enrolment.
Admissions loads and transforms applications and reference data from SITS:Vision with Azure Data Factory, which is a cloud based ETL (extract, transform, and load) and data integration service.
Integration runtime
Azure Data Factory requires that the Microsoft integration runtime is setup on a server within the same network as the SITS:Vision database. Note that this applies to both on-premises and cloud-hosted environments. The integration runtime creates a secure connection between the SITS:Vision database and the Admissions temporary storage using an authentication key from Settings. For security reasons, the authentication key should be changed regularly. For more information on the Integration runtime, go to Microsoft Integration runtime 
.
The integration runtime requires a database account to access the SITS:Vision database tables. Tribal provides a script file for SQL and Oracle that creates a database account with the required permissions on the database tables or assigns the required permissions to an existing account. However, for security reasons, only use an existing account if the account does not have other permissions on the database.
Pipelines
Data factory pipelines define the activities that transfer data from SITS:Vision to Admissions. Pipelines run at scheduled times, such as every night at 10:00PM or on demand. The data transfer process consists of two stages, leg 1 and leg 2.
On leg 1, data is transferred from the on-premises of cloud database to temporary storage in Admissions. The data factory command channel enables communication of information related to the data transfer activity to the Integration runtime. The data factory data channel transfers data between the SITS:Vision database and the Admissions temporary storage. All data transfers are via secure channel HTTPS/TLS to prevent any data interception during communication between the systems. The transferred data is stored in temporary storage. For more information on pipelines and activities, go to Azure Data Factory pipelines and activities .
The command and data channels do not require the opening of inbound ports on the firewall. The Integration runtime retrieves the information related to data transfer activities via the command channel from a queue service that is populated by the first data factory. For more information on the queue service, go to Azure service bus relay.
The temporary storage supports SSE (storage service encryption), which automatically encrypts data as the data is persisted to storage and then decrypts before retrieval. For more information on data storage security, go to Azure storage security .
On leg 2, data is transformed and loaded into the production database for use in Admissions. A second data factory and pipeline extracts the data from the temporary storage to a staging database and then transforms and loads the data to the production database. The staging and production databases support TDE (transparent data encryption), which encrypts data at rest. That is, when the data is not being retrieved, and performs real-time decryption and encryption of the database when needed. For more information on database security, go to Azure database security.
The diagram Importing data from SITS:Vision shows how applications are extracted from the SITS:Vision database, loaded to temporary storage in leg 1, and then transformed for the Admissions SQL databases in leg 2.
