API management can transform your business, unlocking new revenue streams and accelerating product development while keeping your data secure. With an API management platform enabling pieces of software to talk to one another, you can easily connect applications, devices and data, ready to flex and scale your organization. But what is API management and how does it work? We reveal all below…
What is API management?
API management can be distilled into four main capabilities:
- Creating and publishing APIs with supporting documentation
- Ensuring they’re consistently secure
- Monitoring performance and activity through analytics and logging
- Managing all your transformations and policies centrally
With an API management tool, you can operate securely, grow efficiently and scale smoothly.
Why is API management important?
API management enables organizations to manage API integrations across their systems and applications. This is important for:
- The simplification of code and services
- Easier implementation and maintenance of security concerns
- Better insight into API usage
An API evolves in stages, forms multiple connections and requires maintenance over its entire lifecycle. The time spent building these integrations from scratch can be cumbersome and draining on internal resources. When you have dozens of APIs (or more), that resource drain intensifies, meaning you need the right tools to manage your APIs.
With API management, you can manage every API lifecycle stage quickly and easily. It can help you connect applications, securely expose business systems to external third-party consumers and enjoy detailed reporting of everything going on in real time, informing business decisions and determining the return on investment (ROI) of new projects.
Ultimately, API management will make your organization’s life easier and support you to achieve more.
What are the benefits of API management?
Here are four of the top benefits of API management to you and your organization:
- Data-driven growth: API management powers strategic decision-making. With access to all the data you need, you have the power to make the right business and investment choices.
- Cost savings: You can develop services more rapidly and lower project costs with an API management platform. Moreover, using a software as a service (SaaS) API management solution, such as Tyk Cloud, gives you flexibility in terms of billing plans. Based on usage data, you can switch between different plans to scale up or down as necessary.
- Security: API developers are no longer solely responsible for baking security into their code. They can rely on an API management platform to provide robust, standardized security policies that meet the business’s needs across the entire API portfolio.
- Operational and engineering efficiency: API management platforms offer the intuitive tools you need to manage your APIs faster and more efficiently. Developers can design, implement and test their APIs in one place with ease.
What are the components of API management?
These four key components are the tools the API management system uses to optimize the performance of APIs:
- API gateway: An API gateways handle all routing requests, API usage, composition and protocol translations between clients and the third-party services they’re connected to. You can configure your gateway through a dashboard user interface, which eliminates the need to write your own configuration files (though you can do that if you prefer).
- Developer portal: This self-service API portal enables you to catalog and expose your APIs, along with associated documentation, for both internal and external use. Developers can use it to subscribe to your APIs. You can implement plans and tiers for external APIs in line with your monetization strategy.
- Reporting and analytics: API management platforms can integrate analytics programs and use protocols designed to extract data for automated reporting and analysis, enabling the easy monitoring of rate limits and other metrics.
- API lifecycle management: API management provides a sustainable solution for designing, testing, onboarding and managing APIs while ensuring adequate version control.
Got two more minutes? Then check out our video on what API management is.
What does an API management platform do?
Some of the functions that an API management platform enables you to carry out include:
- Authentication and authorization: Making sure that the user accessing the API is who they say they are and that they are authorized to use the API.
- Logging: Keeping detailed logs of who accessed the API, what their requests contained, and what the responses looked like.
- Transformations: This transforms or manipulates the data in a request or response so an upstream service can process it.
- Rate limiting and quotas: Enforcing usage rules to ensure that users accessing the API are not exceeding their allowable limits in terms of how many times they invoke the API.
- Developer access: This controls how users are onboarded so they can use the API.
- Monitoring and alerts: The ability to monitor API traffic and errors as your APIs are being consumed and alert administrators when a certain event occurs.
- Reporting: Creating reports to inspect API performance, usage and more.
An API management platform enables you to solve and enforce all the concerns outlined above in one place, without needing to configure all these requirements directly within your code.
API management: The key to unlocking your digital transformation
The right API management solution can unlock your digital transformation, reducing complexity and enabling you to move at speed, while delivering the proven outcomes you need. All while ensuring robust security between your clients and your back-end services and delivering superior digital experiences.
APIs are an integral part of modern digital transformations. That’s why transformation strategies need to embrace API management tools. An effective API management solution means you can knit together legacy systems, microservices, disparate data sources and more, all managed through one platform. It also means you can work with REST APIs, GraphQL, gRPC, legacy SOAP APIs… whatever you need.
Using API management tools in this way takes care of the ‘how’ part of your digital transformation, so you can focus on where you want to get to.
Maximizing the value of your APIs with effective management strategies
Effective API management can maximize the value of your APIs in multiple ways. It can improve your API security, deliver enhanced performance and underpin rapid scaling, meaning you can get greater value from every API.
Implementing reliable analytics and monitoring as part of your API management strategy also means you can understand how your APIs are being used. A carefully considered approach to observability can enable you to see what’s happening in detail, enabling you to respond to customer needs and identify and troubleshoot issues faster.
An API management platform with a decent developer portal and API documentation can add value to your APIs by making it easy for developers to find them, understand them and self-serve.
Effective API management can also support everything from enhanced governance and compliance to more agile innovation, meaning you keep everyone from your regulators to your teams happy – as well as your customers. All of which ensures optimal value from your APIs.
The role of API management in enabling data-driven decision making
An effective approach to API management means you can collect and analyze the usage statistics you need to make the right business decisions. You can:
- Use analytics tools and alerts to monitor your operations in real-time, using alerts to jump on any issues before your customers notice
- Understand and optimize API performance
- Analyze user demographics and customer behavior, then tailor your services and monetization strategy accordingly
- Streamline data access and sharing to ensure the right decision-makers can monitor the right metrics
- Grow your business based on a full understanding of your broader API ecosystem
API management use cases
Tyk’s customers have shown the vast range of use cases that API management platforms can serve. Some of the most common include using API management for authentication and authorization, digital transformation and API security.
Businesses also turn to platform providers for a central API management solution – one that covers managing internal APIs, external APIs or both. Rate limiting and quota management is another popular use case, with businesses around the world using this to optimize API performance and availability, defend against denial-of-service attacks and manage costs.
API management: Enabling secure and controlled access to your data
API management enables you to implement secure and controlled access to your data, whether you’re working with a single REST API or a complex architecture with hundreds of APIs in different formats. You can put robust authentication and authorization mechanisms in place, using security policies to achieve consistency and reliability across your access control.
Simplify your API management with clear insights
An easy-to-use management interface – such as Tyk Dashboard – is important for managing all aspects of the API lifecycle. It can also enable you to quickly understand usage trends and monitor your API ecosystem. Clear insights and user-friendly efficiencies underpin sound business decision-making, meaning the usability of your API management interface is an important consideration.
Conclusion
API management enables you to create and publish consistently secure APIs, manage everything centrally and monitor the performance of your API products. This supports secure, efficient business scaling while enabling you to delight your users with your APIs.
Next steps
Now that you’re up to speed with API management, why not dive into the detail of what an API gateway is?
