What is API management?

API management is a necessity for any organization that wants to maintain a competitive advantage in today’s digital landscape.

APIs are so vital because they connect different pieces of software to one another, allowing programmers and developers to ensure that various types of software and hardware can interface.

Remote APIs connect software on different systems together over the network. It is these remote APIs that enable our digitally connected world, and this will be the type of API referred to in the rest of this paper. Whether used in banking, healthcare, e-commerce or any other industry, remote APIs continue to transform the modern approach to digital business and IT, but they can only be of value to your organization if you have a strong API management solution in place.

APIs are a key method for companies to make their services available to customers and partners, and an increasing number of companies are creating them to provide digital connectivity. APIs have been around for many years, and different styles of them are growing in popularity.

Any organization creating APIs will face challenges if they don’t have a consistent method of organizing and handling them. The specific challenges, though, can vary depending on the company, industry and level of adoption of API technology.

For example, an organization might focus on the technological side of making APIs available—which style of API to create, which language or framework to use, and so on. This focus is natural when starting to create APIs, but the organization may find itself without any governance, version control or ways of ensuring that policies are met and implemented.

When developers create an API, their focus is on the core business logic—what function the API provides for the business and how it can be built from source, deployed as a process and maintained in a code repository. What the developers may be missing, though, are nonfunctional requirements such as governance, analytics and socialization.

IT architects will then find themselves facing a sprawl of different APIs from multiple developers, possibly built using different tools and programming languages. This makes it difficult for them to define and enforce clear-cut patterns for building APIs that meet enterprise requirements and architectural objectives.

For a CTO and other C-suite officers, the challenges surrounding APIs have less to do with low-level technical issues and more to do with untapped business value and inefficiencies or insecurities in the IT system. APIs provide a potential line-of-business revenue stream that can be tapped into, so CTOs want to ensure they are managed, secured and curated. APIs can go from being merely a technical asset to something that can derive greater business value when they are shared well internally, improving reuse, or externally, driving new business channels.

These challenges exist for organizations of any size because APIs are a transformative force for all digitally connected businesses. Enterprises that are driven by APIs need a consistent and scalable approach to manage them and to enforce security, governance, version control, and API adoption and usage. The solution to these challenges is the implementation of a robust API management system.

API management, as the name suggests, is the combination of people, processes and technology to exercise control over APIs for the benefit of a business or organization.

Even though APIs originated as a technical solution to a business problem—a way for organizations to make their data and services visible and available to outside users—they also created a need to provide oversight—governance—of their implementation. That’s where API management comes in, providing a loose coupling between the consumer looking for APIs and the provider making them available—or exposing them—as well as creating an interface to manage them.

Essentially, an API management solution provides a set of tools to build APIs easily, manage their lifecycles, provide governance to their implementation, socialize them with internal and external users, and take care of change management and versioning.

To accomplish this level of API management, developers need a trusted, secure, reliable environment where they can test that their APIs run as expected, without any threats or unintended access. A proper API management solution will provide this environment, along with additional insight into the APIs once they’re running, so that developers—and other concerned parties with access—can see what’s going on in the API environment. This includes the consumer base for specific APIs and how those consumers are using them, allowing for better decision-making on both the business and technical fronts of an organization.

The primary element of an API management solution is the API gateway—an interface into back-end business applications that brings together all of the disparate systems represented by the APIs through a set of common policies and security enforcement. This gateway allows a user to put enterprise or organizational policies on top of the APIs, including log-in rules, standard security, rate limiting and even monetization.

Security is therefore a key piece of API management, with the gateway providing security standards that handle confidentiality and encryption, making sure that data isn’t modified without the proper allowances. The API gateway’s key runtime component acts as the policy enforcement point, protecting and controlling access to API services through multiple security, rate limiting, and entitlement checks. Access to an API can be protected using the most up-to-date security protocols, all of which are configurable through policies that can be set for individual APIs or at a global level.

With enforcement of security policies, APIs can be made available to other users, with only those who are fully authenticated able to access the APIs. In addition, the gateway can mask sensitive data to promote data security as it’s logged and stored, thus helping meet the compliance requirements and standards of multiple industries.

Beyond just security, though, the gateway is vital because management and governance of APIs require consistency, regardless of where those APIs are deployed. Proper API management demands a consistent way to manage APIs, both from a business perspective—answering questions such as what the products should be and who the target customers are— and from a technical perspective—where APIs are being deployed, how they’re performing, how many errors they have, and so on.

Another key element of API management is an efficient way to socialize APIs, because “management” here refers not just to a technical implementation or interface but also the safe and secure sharing of data so that third parties can create new content based on it.

As such, API management requires tooling that allows for discovery and consumption of APIs and thus enables no-code or low-code ways to make them available and publish them as well as providing a space for developers to interact with each other, from blogs to torrents and discussion boards. This helps develop a vibrant community of developers and consumers, expanding both brand reach and the API value chain.

Also important to API management is automation, which applies to both change management and testing of APIs. For example, AI can learn how APIs have been used and, from that, generate test cases to understand how they should work whenever a new version is deployed. This use of automation and AI can expand from technical aid to overall governance of all of an organization’s APIs, allowing for full lifecycle management in which APIs can be staged, internally tested, enabled to go public with visibility control, and eventually sunset.

Versioning is another integral part of managing the API lifecycle. As business services in an organization change, so too do the API contracts associated with those services, and communicating those changes to consumers is vital. Consumers must understand what is changing from version to version in order to remain content and satisfied with their API user experience.

API management is an essential process for organizations that treat APIs as products—that is, as software solutions provided to consumers to solve business problems—and it can prove just as vitally important to organizations that use a multitude of APIs as part of their infrastructure.

API management = all the governance, processing and tooling needed to manage API deployment, implementation and security.

Today’s enterprise businesses have data and assets in multiple locations, ranging from on premises to multiple cloud environments. Therefore, it’s critical that an API management solution be flexible to deploy just about anywhere, providing consistent and centralized management that is cloud-agnostic.

API management helps organizations reduce time to market, gain insight into their APIs, and overcome costly and time-consuming pain points such as lack of governance, lack of visibility, inability to make APIs available for consumption, and reliance on an IT department.

Three roles within an organization are especially positioned to reap these benefits: developers, IT architects and CTOs.