It's like a booking a flight. Select your departure, called a "data source", which is the origin where your data already exists. Then select your destination, which is where you want a copy of your origin data to be sent and constantly updated.
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Give Flatly permission to access your data in your data source. This is most often read-only access which means Flatly cannot change anything in your data source app, but only read your data for sync and analytics purposes.
Decide exactly which data you want Flatly to sync. Flatly will only replicate this one data set to a single file in your cloud storage. If you want to sync additional data sets you can set up additional syncs at any time.
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Click a single button to replicate your data immediately or on an ongoing basis. Presto, you are done.
Flatly is a web application that runs in your browser. It presents you with a simple graphical user interface that lets you manage multiple connections to other apps and clouds. Behind the scenes, the service uses your connections to periodically read, flatten and upload your data to your cloud storage or spreadsheet of choice. The service relies on secure, publicly documented channels called "APIs" or Application Programming Interfaces which are essentially just digital pipes going into and coming out of apps and clouds.
The term "flat" refers to the tabular layout, consisting of row and columns, of data common in flat files. This format contrasts with the more complex multi-dimensional format that data can manifest in while it is housed in applications or in heavy duty databases. Flat files essentially mean simplicity and versatility.
If you are using a popular app like Google Sheets, Excel Online, Smartsheet or Dropbox then you will not need any technical knowledge beyond what is required to use those clouds. Some clouds like Google BigQuery, Amazon S3 or Azure Storage will require familiarity with basic cloud infrastructure navigation.
Data integration and app integration are two different models. Flatly excels at replicating bulk data as opposed to individual snapshots of data triggered at some point in time in the past. Since records constantly change (example: a support ticket's urgency or assigned agent might change several times over the course of a week) it is essential to frequently re-check and re-replicate the data for analytics. Flatly is specialized purely for the flat file format in conjunction with cloud storage and spreadsheet apps.
From the moment you authorize a new connection, your credentials are encrypted using AES 256 and stored in a secure database in Google Cloud. Flatly then uses your credentials to fetch, transform and replicate your business data to a cloud that you control. As soon as the replication is complete, Flatly permanently deletes the copy of your data from our cache. This is called no-persistence and it means that Flatly is a conduit system -one that processes but does not store, or "persist", your data in its own infrastructure. Unlike other companies, Flatly's infrastructure is only accessed by one single human administrator, our CEO.
