API Management and Strategy

API Management and Strategy

API Management is critical for businesses to meet and exceed expectations of their partners, consumers, and employees. You need to be assured that your data remains stable and secure even while customers are served through multiple devices and channels. Sophisticated API management strategies provide opportunities to create new revenue, innovate, and launch new products faster, and provide the digital experiences that customers expect.

API management is the process of publishing, documenting and overseeing application programming interfaces (APIs) in a secure, scalable environment. The goal of API management is to allow an organization that publishes an API to monitor the interface’s lifecycle and make sure the needs of developers and applications using the API are being met.

API management software tools typically provide the following functions:

• Automate and control connections between an API and the applications that use it.
• Ensure consistency between multiple API implementations and versions.
• Monitor traffic from individual apps.
• Provide memory management and caching mechanisms to improve application performance.
• Protect the API from misuse by wrapping it in security procedures and policies.

Manage all of your APIs in one place

• Expose all APIs behind a single static IP and domain.
• Get near real-time usage, performance and health analytics.
• Automate management and integrate using REST API, PowerShell and Git.
• Provision API Management and scale it on demand in one or more geographical regions.

API publishing is becoming a pressing technology concern for an ever-wider range of organizations. More and more companies and public sector agencies want to realize the business value of APIs but many decision makers lack a basic understanding of the technology behind APIs. In this lesson, we provide an overview of what APIs are and what they do.

APIs (application programming interfaces) provide a way to connect computer software components. Broadly speaking, APIs make it possible for organizations to open their backend data and functionality for reuse in new application services.

An API achieves this by facilitating interactions between code modules, applications and backend IT systems. The API specifies the way in which these different software components can interact with each other and enables content and data to be shared between components.

The API is not a new concept. But as the complexity of computer systems has increased, the need for APIs has increased, as evidenced by their prevalence in operating systems, programming languages and networks – including the Web.

As more and more organizations have adopted the Web as the primary network for systems integration and have started seeking ways to connect their information technology assets to online portals and mobile apps, adoption of APIs has grown rapidly.

When people talk about APIs today, they are more often than not referring to these “Web APIs”. On a technical level, a Web API can be defined as any software interface exposed over the HTTP protocol in order to facilitate the development of Web, mobile and cloud applications.

Web APIs are particularly important in social media – for example, a network might publish an API that allows developers to create client applications for posting status updates from mobile devices. However, Web APIs are becoming increasingly vital to organizations across all sectors.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

API Design/API Architecture

Developing and implementing application programming interfaces in order to expose backend data and application functionality for reuse in new applications.

API Management

Ensuring that APIs perform consistently and do not impact the security or performance of the backend systems they expose.

API Publisher

An organization that uses APIs to expose its backend systems to internal, partner or third-party developers of client applications.

Client Application

An application (including but not limited to Web, mobile and cloud apps) that relies on data and functionality accessed via APIs.

Web API

An API that exposes backend systems over the Web, using the HTTP protocol, specifically to facilitate the creation of Web, mobile and cloud applications.