Why APIs are Critical for Modernizing Your Business Operations
- By Sanjay Kalra, VP, Digital Transformation and Head, Alliances
- 09 March, 2023
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APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are an essential component for modernizing business operations. A research by Google reveals that businesses are increasingly relying on APIs.
APIs allow different applications to communicate and exchange data seamlessly, making it easier to integrate systems and automate processes.
This level of integration and automation has become increasingly important in today's fast-paced business environment, where organizations need to respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer demands. APIs enable businesses to create new services and applications, leverage data from multiple sources, and improve collaboration across different departments and teams.
The API Lifecycle
On the path to modernization and digital transformation, APIs can play a key role in your business’ ability to drive superior digital experiences. But APIs, by nature, are dynamic - it is important to continually improve your APIs to adjust to constantly evolving customer and business needs.
- Starting at the top with API design, we move to development once the design has been reviewed and approved by stakeholders. Of course, security cannot be an afterthought - It has to be integral to the design and development of APIs.
- The developed APIs are launched by deploying them into production and publishing it to app developers (internal or external). Once your APIs are in production, we help monitor the health and usage of APIs.
- Analytics are important to determine your API's adoption, scale, and how they can be improved. Also, depending on your business model, you may want to monetize your APIs, charging for the use or sharing revenue with app developers who are driving new business.
- And finally, based on the feedback from your app developers that use your APIs and the insights you gain from monitoring and analyzing your API program, you can build a backlog of improvements and changes. This leads to beginning the cycle again with API design.
Improved API management with Apigee & Intelliswift
Beyond using the industry standard Open API specification, Intelliswift leverages Apigee API Management Platform from its partner Google Cloud. Apigee provides a low-code / no-code tool for building API proxies, uses JavaScript or Java to develop custom code for complex cases, and helps debug using a stress tool. It protects users by supporting multi-factor authentication and supports many authentication methods, including SAML, OpenID Connect, email, and password, or custom implementations. Apigee provides a management API that can be used to create and deploy proxies and configuration artifacts as part of a deployment pipeline, allowing you to build a repeatable process for deploying new or updated APIs.
Apigee provides two types of developer portals that help app developers discover your APIs and register apps to use them - a Drupal-based portal that offers a full-featured customizable content management system, and a hosted integrated portal, that is deployable out of the box.
Apigee's API monitoring provides near-real-time insights into API traffic, performance and usage, automatically capturing API and back-end latencies, error rates, and call volume, among other operational metrics.
In addition to API and performance metrics, Apigee captures business metrics, tracking the apps and app developers using your APIs and the device types and geolocation of the users of those apps. Apigee's analytics data can be integrated into your own enterprise systems by using the metrics API or by extracting the data into Google's cloud storage or BigQuery.
Companies with public API programs or those that offer digital products to partners can use Apigee's monetization capability to create revenue streams based on API-powered digital products. Apigee monetization allows you to charge for API usage or share revenue with app developers that drive your business.
Apigee also leverages features of the Google Cloud platform - e.g., Cloud Armor Web Application Firewall for security, Identity platform for IAM, BigQuery for enhanced analytics, etc.
At Intelliswift, we help our customers with the entire API life cycle. Connect with us to gain valuable insights and take your API strategy to the next level.
