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API Management

API Management: Apply the Power of APIs to Business Challenges

• 04 March 2019
• by: Aisha Javed
• in: BlogPost
• Tags: API Management, API Management Market, APIs, Business Challenges
• note: no comments

The report “API Management Market” shows the potential of APIs economical growth.The API management market is estimated to grow from USD 606.8 Million in 2016 to USD 2,665.3 Million by 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 34.4%. Major growth drivers of this market are:

 

• Increasing demand for private and public APIs
• Growing popularity of Web APIs
• Growing number of mobile devices

 

What is an API?

In the debate on digitization, which has been going on for years, APIs offer a concrete opportunity for many companies to expand their own business at a manageable expense.  Modern APIs are flexible ways of projecting your capabilities to an audience outside of your own team. If done right, APIs enables enterprises to quickly reform the legacy architectures, add value to existing IT assets, and creates new product opportunities or revenue streams.

 

In other words, an API is a communication channel to an application, built with set of customs and protocols that makes a website’s data digestible for a computer. Through it, a computer can view and edit data, just like a person can by loading pages and submitting forms. Depending on their needs, APIs can be used internally, with partners, or made available to the general public.

Making data easier to work with is good because it means people can write software to automate tedious and labor-intensive tasks. What might take a human hours to accomplish can take a computer seconds through an API.  Therefore, sophisticated API management makes it possible to successfully build up coverage and additional business – without having a direct, direct connection to the new target groups.

 

How An API Is Used

When two systems (websites, desktops, smartphones) link up through an API, we say they are “integrated.” In an integration, we have 2 sides, each side have a name. 1^stone is the server that provides the API, a program running on the serve. It may be part of the same program that handles web traffic, or it can be a separate one, sitting, waiting for others to ask it for data.

 

The 2^ndside is the “client.” This is a separate program that knows what data is available through the API and can manipulate it, typically at the request of a user. A great example is a smartphone app that syncs with a website. When you push the refresh button of your app, it talks to a server via an API and fetches the newest info. The same goes for the websites that are integrated. When one site pulls in data from the other, the site providing the data is acting as the server, and the site fetching the data is the client.

 

APIs Enable Businesses

APIs have emerged as a key element of tech modernization at many businesses. Banks and insurersand also companies such as UBER, eBay, PayPal and Amazon, are using the growth driver API management for a long time. For many, they are the key competitive advantage or even thebusiness foundation. With their ability to link systems and data, they play a crucial role in making IT systems more responsive and adaptable.

 

APIs are programming interfaces that companies use to make information or entire business processes accessible to outsiders. Properly implemented, they significantly reduce the technological and organizational entry barriers for communicating and establishing new business-to-business relationships. Technical interfaces and automated processes simplify what hitherto hierarchically organized sales structures have handled. This is particularly interesting for small and medium-sized businesses that do not have it.

 

Successful API management

The introduction of APIs is often reduced to the use of middleware with different technical features. However, if you want to successfully establish APIs, you need to be fully involved with API Management. It requires profound organizational and technical adjustments, both in IT and in specialist areas. A successful API management architecture is built on three functional components:

 

• The Management Portal
• The Developer Portal
• The API Gateway

 

• Management Portal

The Management Portal is the hub of internal API managementthat allows administrators to define APIs, deploy APIs, and promote APIs through the environments. Authorization management determines which content users can see and use to what extent. In this way, contractual relationships can be made simpler – they can be partially standardized and automated.

 

• Developer Portal

 

The developer portal is the face of your API program, providing everything that internal, partner, and third party developers need. Via this portal, App Developers are able to connect with the resources necessary to learn about the enterprise’s APIs and collaborate with peers and with the enterprise.

 

• API Gateway

Is to secure and mediate the traffic between clients and backends, and between a company’s APIs and the developers, customers, partners, and employees who use the APIs

 

 

APIs is becoming, more than ever again, a requirement for building digital businesses. They enable companies to quickly develop new approaches to serving the needs of a varied mix of users with a whole new set of expectations. Therefore, companies must think of them as central to the application development process and key to competing in the digital economy.

With the new requirements of the digital world, customer- centric IT organizations, and the ever-present need to connect disparate internal systems, managing APIs and API-driven businesses becomes increasingly challenging, companies must ensure developers and partners to be productive and manage, secure, and mediate their API traffic in a best possible way.

 

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