Did you know that 85% of organisations consider APIs the backbone of their digital strategy? In today’s hyper-connected world, APIs are pivotal in facilitating seamless data exchange and communication, and API platform teams are at the heart of it all.
But – let’s be honest – API platform teams face plenty of challenges when it comes to managing, securing and optimising APIs. At least, they do unless they have a powerful API management platform at their disposal. One with five transformative capabilities that help platform teams unlock the full potential of their API ecosystems…
Enter Tyk! If you’re currently dealing with API platform challenges, it’s here to make your life easier. Here’s how.
API security
Tyk puts API security best practices at your fingertips. We include everything an API platform needs for robust security right out of the box. Why? So you can focus on the business logic and ensure your API programmes shine.
By using Tyk to manage your APIs, you can stop fretting about building security into every API and microservice because it’s already there, filtering from your API management layer to every part of your infrastructure. You can use our agile solution straight out of the box or customise it to your requirements – whatever suits you best.
Tyk delivers end-to-end security from an API perspective, meaning you can lock down your APIs and ensure that only the right people can access them and in the ways you deem fitting. Superb access control enables you to manage your keys better and tokens better.
You can use secure protocols, methodologies and systems to protect your infrastructure. Tyk enables key hashing, support for TLS and SSL, certificate pinning and more. Whether you want to use Bearer Tokens, HMAC, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Multi-Chained Authentication, OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect, we’ve got you covered. Then, you can view a full set of analytics through Tyk Dashboard to monitor what’s going on in detail.
If you’re ready to enable robust security practices company-wide to prevent unauthorised access to data and infrastructure, with support for all the open standards that most security professionals recommend, you’re ready for Tyk.
API governance
Tyk simplifies governance to ensure people can do the right things better without accidentally breaking anything. You can retain centralised governance while delegating access and autonomy to multiple teams, using Tyk’s Open Policy Agent to achieve fine-grained control over policy deployment at API, user and key level. We make it easy to use single sign-on (SSO) and role-based access control (RBAC), too.
Policies, regulations, best practices, standards… Tyk puts all of this and more into the hands of platform teams so you can govern your API ecosystem with the utmost confidence.
Efficiency and flexibility are central to Tyk’s approach to API governance. You can use Tyk across multiple regions and multiple clouds, with a range of different architectural styles, meeting compliance and data sovereignty obligations in different territories. All in a dynamic way that means you can flex and scale your business model however you wish while your governance keeps pace.
For maximum efficiency, you can easily integrate Tyk into your CI/CD pipelines, and implement an internal developer portal complete with comprehensive documentation. Whatever your governance needs, you can throw them all at Tyk.
API rate limiting and quota management
Mastering rate limiting gives you the ultimate power and control to ensure your APIs aren’t overwhelmed with requests and that they remain reliable and performant while affording fair usage to all.
Tyk provides you with plenty of flexibility when it comes to rate limiting. Leaky bucket, fixed window, sliding window, sliding log… whichever approach works best for your business, you can implement it easily with Tyk.
The same is true of quota management. You can use Tyk Dashboard to set a quota in just a few clicks. Event-drive quotas reset when keys are actively being used for maximum efficiency, though you can also set quotas to reset on a given date if you prefer. Again, Tyk moulds around your needs, providing the tools to manage your traffic in the way that makes most sense for your particular circumstances.
API integration
The ability to make different software systems work harmoniously has enormous potential, not just from a technical standpoint but in terms of business growth and competitive advantage. This is why API integration is such a superpower.
You can use API integration to maximise productivity through automated workflows and real-time data access. You can use it to enhance customer experiences. And you can use it to streamline your operations to reach your goals faster.
Tyk supports you in achieving all this (and so much more!) through the seamless management and integration of REST, SOAP, gRPC and GraphQL APIs. There are various ways you can do so. With Tyk’s Universal Data Graph, for example, you can manage services built using different protocols and design patterns, removing the need to completely overhaul your infrastructure. Meanwhile, for old SOAP services, Tyk enables you to expose them as JSON-based RESTful services with zero coding in just five minutes – all through body transformations in Tyk Dashboard.
This flexibility means you can make the most of your business potential through powerful API integrations that enable seamless data exchange and communication between services.
API observability
If your API platform team is focused on API-led growth, getting observability right is essential. With the right observability elements in place, you can monitor and analyse everything from the health of your APIs to how they are being consumed, supporting service reliability and data-driven decision-making that underpins exceptional business value.
There are plenty of ways that Tyk enables you to see clearly what’s going on with your APIs. Automated health checks and real-time alerts provide an early warning system for anything that goes awry, with native integrations with Slack and PagerDuty ensuring you don’t miss anything. You can easily write webhooks for email and SMS notifications, too.
Tyk Dashboard is one tool in your observability arsenal, letting you look into all requests that have come in, latency, errors, endpoint popularity, API usage over time (including filtering by version and tags), traffic activity per key, geographic activity, logs, service uptime and more. The other tool at your disposal is Tyk Pump, which exports analytics data to your favourite business intelligence tool. It means you can take a deep dive into your observability data in whichever way suits you best.
Time to take your API platform strategy forward
Tyk is the key to unlocking these transformative API platform powers. Our solution enables you to provide standout API experiences that translate into tangible business outcomes. Of course, you’ll also need to build a platform strategy your team wants in on. Why not chat with our team to find out more?
