Data integration and ETL tools move data between systems: they extract it from applications and databases, transform and clean it, and load it into a warehouse, lake or another application. Organisations use them to build reporting pipelines, synchronise systems after a merger and prepare data for analytics and machine learning. Informatica and Fivetran are common reference points; many European teams also run open-source pipeline frameworks.
Integration platforms touch almost every system and hold credentials for each. A managed service therefore holds the keys to your CRM, ERP and databases, and may stage or cache data on its own infrastructure while processing it. Where that staging happens, and who can read the connection secrets, matters as much as where the final warehouse sits. Lock-in comes from pipelines built in a proprietary designer and connector catalogue: the logic can rarely be exported as code.
When choosing a European option, ask where processing and temporary storage take place, how connection credentials are encrypted, and whether the data plane can run inside your own environment while the vendor only provides the control plane. Prefer pipelines that can be expressed as code or open formats, and check the quality of the connectors for the systems you actually use.