Talend Inc. is rolling out a cloud-based version of its data integration platform that aims to address the increasingly distributed nature of the modern enterprise. The launch represents an effort to level the playing field against the hosted options already available through the competition.

The shift away from traditional on-premise licensing within the segment is driven by more than the demand for better pricing and accessibility that is propelling the trend in the rest of the industry. The growing number of workloads that organizations are moving outside the firewall in pursuit of those benefits has also created a tangible need to extend back-end integration processes beyond the data center.

But that’s much easier said than done for a large enterprise with upwards of thousands of employees each using a different combination of third party services to carry out their daily work. Talend promises to take some of the hassle out of the process with the new cloud-based platform, which has been specially adapted for off-premise data management.

The platform introduces a new system for controlling the flow of external information that the company promises can enable administrators to extend the access controls and other policy enforcement mechanisms they’ve set up for their on-premise applications to external services. That feature is useful in a wide range of scenarios, such as ensuring personally identifiable details aren’t accidentally mixed into a freely viewable dataset.

Organizations can apply the functionality to over 800 applications through the built-in connectors that Talend has bundled into the service, which also offers other value-added components such as workflow templates and best practices from its user marketplace. Users can access those features through a dashboard based on Eclipse, a popular open-source development platform, that has likewise been with created with the needs of distributed organizations in mind.

The interface includes a shared workbench that allows teams to collaborate on integration models and a sandbox for tuning new variations before rolling out to production. Talend is charging between $1,000 and $4,500 per user per month for the service depending on which of the three available plans an organization chooses.