The economic climate might look a bit gloomy, but we are not adding to it in this blog. Oh, no. Today, we’re giving shining optimism with sprinkles of hard facts for good measure.
In the business world, integrating systems and ensuring the easy consumption of your services by your customers is crucial, and it’s understandable to worry about the damage a dodgy economy could bring to your projects.
But the emergence of the API economy has revolutionised the way companies scale, which is why those looking to elevate their business should consider how to harness its power and see how APIs, and an API management platform, in particular, can offer shortcuts – without the cutting corners part.
So here are six things an APIM integration platform can offer to save you time and money in a recession:
1. Monitor and control API usage
APIM platforms reduce infrastructure costs by monitoring your traffic via analytics, where you can use real-time data to scale and maintain performance efficiently.
A dashboard that lets you see all your API calls and responses at all stages of the API journey enables you to identify your most popular APIs and spot any errors through a straightforward interface.
API monitoring can save your business a lot of money by driving the right decisions. Understanding your product usage means you can glean insights about how and where to invest in the business.
2. Reduce shadow APIs
Gartner predicts that by 2025, the percentage of third-party APIs used in applications will average 30 percent, up from 10 percent in 2021. While RESTful and SOAP APIs are the headline makers, shadow APIs are troublemakers if they are improperly managed and watched over.
Since shadow APIs live outside the routine IT governance management and security processes, this can lead to costly vulnerabilities and security incidents.
APIM platforms manage and govern all APIs by investing in discovery, cataloguing and automatic validation and using an adaptive governance approach to handle a wide range of use cases and API types. This improves architectural resiliency by actively managing the consumption of APIs, using both internal and third-party APIs.
3. Reduce threats and hacking
Similarly, API Management is a critical component in mitigating all types of API security threats and hacking.
API management platforms sit at the heart of the modern API stack as an integral component. They deliver powerful security capabilities simply and cost-effectively to both internal creators and external consumers by:
Monitoring your APIs
Continually monitoring your API activity in real time is essential for ensuring their security. A dashboard within an APIM platform is a highly valuable tool for tracking API usage.
Implementing throttling
Throttling restricts system access by attackers without impacting the ability of authorised users to do their jobs, in addition to ensuring traffic doesn’t exceed the bandwidth capacity of your backend system.
Authenticating users
Authentication is verifying a user’s identity before allowing them to access your system. In the case of APIs, it ensures that only authorised users can call an API.
Updating your infrastructure
Strong API security needs a solid infrastructure, including a secure network and software with all available patches. APIM platforms are highly flexible and scalable to accommodate today’s dynamic business environment.
4. Access to data anywhere
Forty percent of organisations said they had experienced revenue growth due to leveraging APIs. One of the primary reasons APIs have become so popular is that it allows people (and firms) to access data that is neither on-premise in their data centres nor their cloud storage.
APIM platforms automatically organise and analyse API data, allowing businesses to manage it differently across other regions and through various local regulations and requirements. This gives more employees the access and data they need to apply it to drive innovation and growth.
5. Increased operational and engineering efficiency
At organisations where API creation is a manual exercise, they must employ a team of developers and other IT staff to get everything up and running. Similarly, enterprise departments that lack concrete, integrated stacks often hire staff members specifically to handle one or two apps.
With an APIM platform and less need for employee specialisation, developers can focus their efforts elsewhere on strategic projects (say, composing new revenue-generating apps, for instance). They also experience greater levels of developer productivity and increased delivery across API design, development, testing and deployment.
6. Flexibility
In a recession, you need to control your tech stack; add new, more efficient components or remove and consolidate components as and when required but still work as a cohesive unit, which is what an APIM platform does.
You may also need the flexibility of deployment solutions and cloud providers so you are not tied down to your existing providers without putting considerable effort into the migration process or, in some cases, switching solutions completely.
Moreover, using a SaaS APIM solution, like Tyk Cloud, gives you flexibility in terms of billing plans. So, based on usage data, you can switch between different plans to scale up or down as and when necessary.
A winning API strategy
An API strategy seeks to create business value from greater use of APIs, align organisations and culture, evaluate, build, and deploy supporting technology and engage your ecosystem. A full lifecycle API management platform facilitates all that and more by providing a centralised solution that will save your business time and money.
In a recession, the traditional approach is treating your spending as discretionary and holding off on new technology to reduce costs. But as we’ve outlined here, to future-proof your business, now is the time to accelerate spending on API management and adopt APIOps practices.
Book a demo today to learn how to enable product-led strategies and deliver secure, production-ready API products and services.
