Chalking Out a Successful API Management Strategy for Your Enterprise
The 21st century business architecture has started leaning toward micro-services-based solutions as building blocks to accomplish business requirements through sophisticated business process functionalities. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) has been a vital cog in supporting the digital transformation efforts of most organizations. Most of them fail to recognize the value of a profound API management strategy, eventually unable to achieve the initially envisioned business goals. In search for instant gratification, organizations often tend to rush to create and implement API programs without analyzing their business requirements and fail to adapt a methodical approach to go about the business.
Despite investing a lot of resources trying to enhance their IT infrastructure, organizations integrate their APIs in an ad hoc manner without realizing the clear strategies and the benefits that come along. On that note, let’s discuss how your organization can leverage API management strategies to reap significant benefits from the success of API ecosystems.
What is API management?
API is an application program designed for applications to interact with each other to exchange data between them. API management refers to the cumulative process of creating, implementing, publishing, and securing APIs to ensure the success of an API product.
With the help of an appropriate API management service, organizations will be able to build integration tools that ensures friction-less corporation with partners and stakeholders, while reducing the overall costs. Henceforth, the success of an API program is hugely dependent on the strategies that govern its consumption.
Types of APIs
The nature of your API management strategy will always depend on the type of API you’re willing to opt for.
APIs come in 4 forms:
· Public APIs — These open APIs are publicly available, with no restrictions to access.
· Partner APIs — These APIs are consumed under partner agreements and require a license to access them.
· Private APIs — These are accessible only within an organization.
· Third-party APIs — These are created and developed by third parties and vendors, involving some sort of subjective agreements.
Need for API Management
The proliferation of API usage is one of the premier reasons organizations feel the urge to deploy an API management strategy. Due to the substantial increase in digital transformation efforts, APIs are the powerhouses in modern application architectures, empowering innovation and growth.
According to a study, 71% organizations expect to observe a surge in the volume of API management strategies by 2022.
Principles of successful API Management
The success of an API management strategy requires a clear roadmap comprising the following five components:
· Executive Support
· Compliant organization structure
· Comprehensive API platforming
· Availability of peripheral tooling
· Awareness programs and campaigns
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Steps to Create a Successful API Management Strategy
1. Choosing the Right Vendor
After a thorough analysis of your business requirements and existing IT infrastructure, we’ll look at all the key differentiators to decide which vendor tool to opt for. Establishing an air-tight digital strategy and ensuring organizational culture alignment play a huge role in choosing the right platform and tool.
Existing IT infrastructure is very instrumental, unless your organization has the space to build a completely new infrastructure from the scratch. The vendor tool that complies with your existing IT infrastructure is the best way forward.
Cloud or On-Premises — The choice basically boils down to whether you want to expose your services internally or externally. Organizations, more often than not, choose cloud over on-premises because they don’t have to deal with the regular updates and maintenance, and subscribe to a plan right away and start using the SaaS.
Transformation and Mediation Capabilities — Deploying a powerful tool to API customization is paramount to subscribe to these benefits.
API Monitoring & Analytics Reporting — These are huge advantages for any enterprise to display the management usage reports and monitor the APIs to ensure it is performing within the SLA.
Security Capabilities — The tool must have the ability to prevent vulnerabilities and insure malwares and attacks with authorization options like OAuth 2.0, API Secret Key, and Basic Auth.
Pricing — This is up to your organization to monetize your tool as much as possible.
2. Enforce API Evangelization
Once you have chosen and deployed your best API tool in place, it is important to enhance communication with the ecosystem to develop its adoption.
If you have private APIs, you can replicate corporate policies to improve developer experience. In case you have chosen partner APIs, shift your focus toward the business benefits that your partners will enjoy.
Promoting and marketing your API strategies will provoke interest in the business ecosystem and potentially spread the usage of APIs among the community.
3. Ensure continual improvement
If you have introduced a new feature, it’s crucial that you document the same and keep the business community apprised. Feedbacks and usage metrics from customers should allow you to act on them to reap more benefits.
This way, you can continually measure your performance and ensure continual growth in your API program, which is critical for your success.
Sign up for a free consultation if your organization needs assistance in deploying a state-of-the-art API management platform.
Read: Unified API Platform- The Heart that keeps your Organization Ticking
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