With customers becoming more demanding than ever, enterprises are becoming more adventurous and in turn the traditional enterprise boundaries are blurring rapidly. Organizations are willing to open their on-premise data and applications to partners, customers, cloud services, mobile apps and websites. This definition of the modern 'Open Enterprise' is being driven by the emergence of API's and enterprises are looking to leverage their power to cope with the ever-changing business needs.
API's provide a solution to enterprises that are looking to open up new revenue streams and add value to existing infrastructure. Rapid Scalability, Extreme Flexibility and Redefined Business Value are all advantages of an API initiative. To tell you the truth, API's are not different when compared to SOA option selected by many enterprises. We expose services for consumption as API's, but in turn create much more open model, with rapid utilization and innovative possibilities.
These API's provide options for developers to do magical things through these gateways into back-end systems. But, how do we manage these API's? Is there a way to provide security for these openly exposed services? How do we control access to their consumption? What happens to applications consuming these API's when we make version changes to the original API's
These are all questions that will pop up for an enterprise looking to adopt an open and flexible API solution for their growth. The answer to all these questions is the upcoming trend in IT, API Management.
API Management products help enterprises to understand, document and analyze their API's. It is very important that organizations secure their API's and provide restricted access to them. API Management also provides a way for organizations to gain insights into the usage of their API's through analytics. This helps organizations to provide better service and experience to consumers of their API's.
API's provide a simple, flexible and scalable approach to solve the needs of a rapidly changing enterprise.