What is a Point-to-Point Integration?

It's usually the fastest way to connect two systems: write one API call or one file transfer job that goes straight from System A to System B, with logic specific to both endpoints baked into that single connection. For a handful of integrations this is simple and fast to ship. The pattern breaks down as the number of systems grows, because the number of point-to-point connections needed to fully interconnect N systems grows roughly with N-squared — ten systems needing to talk to each other can mean dozens of bespoke connections, each with its own auth, retry logic, and data mapping to maintain. A change to one system's API can ripple into every point-to-point connection touching it, since there's no shared translation layer absorbing the change. This is why growing organizations often migrate from point-to-point integrations toward a hub-and-spoke or event-bus architecture (an integration platform, an ESB, or pub-sub messaging) where each system connects once to a central layer instead of once to every other system it needs data from — trading a bit of upfront complexity for dramatically less maintenance as the system count rises.