The essential aspects for making your APIs work!

We are connected to the world and each other like never before. Due to instant connectivity, the world is at our feet. APIs are at ​the heart of this ever-growing connectivity​. Without even knowing it, we ​interact​​ with many APIs on a daily basis​. Hence, APIs play an important role in business environments.

Starting with some APIs is easy. However, creating a successful API Management program that helps your organization achieve its strategic goals and provides value to customers, is a substantial endeavor.

With the API Conference 2022 “Making APIs work” coming up, it’s the perfect moment to recap on some of the essential aspects to make your API journey into a success.

API strategy as starting point of your API Management program

An API strategy establishes a direction and outlines a clear path for your API Management program. It brings focus and makes the organization work towards your goals. It ensures that your future APIs bring business and IT value and that they realize your overall business objectives. Early involvement of business and other stakeholders in the API management program will also help adoption within the organization.

In short, your strategy is about building the right APIs. Decisions made here will heavily influence future choices within the other aspects. For example, if monetization is a strategic API driver, then your platform capabilities must support this.

API maturity model to steer and build up your API initiative step by step

Increasing an organization’s API maturity is not an easy job, as you need to change the daily behavior of people. It is not just a matter of training: you need to make people aware and convince them of the new way of working and thinking. So, you need some change management techniques to increase your maturity.

Introducing an API maturity model helps you to steer and build up your API initiative step by step. By applying different gates, you can implement all necessary building blocks at the right time.

API Management Platforms are essential

More and more organizations are getting aboard the API Management train, introducing API Management Platforms for a variety of reasons. These API Management Platforms provide a wide range of capabilities such as Management, Mediation, Measurement, Security and so much more.

We are happy to see that the API Management Platforms did step up to the plate and are providing most of the required capabilities with high quality! The adoption rate within organizations can be considered high. However, we witness a difference between organizations their initial intentions vs the actual use and added value they achieve.

API design tailored to your organization

When organizations are looking at API design, they often try to copy the design approach from big companies like Netflix or Microsoft as they have some great public APIs. However, these guidelines do not cover all the aspects of API design, and above all these companies are probably targeting another kind of developer community. That is why we believe that API design needs to be tailored to the needs of your organization. There is simply no one size fits all solution!

There is no magic cookbook for API Design. Keep in mind your enterprise culture, context and maturity when tailoring your API design approach. Handle a step-by-step approach to implement your design. Never skip guidance and methodology, they are necessary to successfully drive the change in your organization.

API Security could be more than you might first expect

API Security became a hot topic only recently. You might wonder, why just now?

The API landscape will continue to grow as we are becoming more and more digital. As a result, organizations will create more and more APIs, which means that the attack surface will continue to expand. This means, also API attacks are on the rise. Gartner predicts that APIs will become the number one attack vector. The industry is reacting to this with a new API Security guidance based on the OWASP API Security Top 10 for example

When we start thinking of API security, we think about authentication and authorization aspects. But if we look at the OWASP top 10, we see that only half of the risks are related to authentication and authorization topics. Therefore, API security – end-to-end- could be more than you might first expect!

API Portal makes your APIs more accessible

There are several APIs used across the internet: Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. There are even businesses whose entire product is based on an API, Stripe for example. All these APIs have something in common, they make their APIs available through a great API Portal.

An API Portal is a great way to make your companies’ API more accessible (in- and/or outside of your company). For developers it’s the central hub of everything required to get started with your APIs, reducing development time. For API providers it’s the single place where all communication and access management takes place, simplifying and reducing time spent on these tasks.

API Testing to guarantee your API behaves as advertised

You might have encountered at one point or another an API that does not behave as advertised, often leading to frustration. But how do we ensure delivery of a quality API? That’s where API testing comes into the picture.

There is no fixed answer as to which approach or tool is the better one, as every situation and need is different. One thing that we do know for sure is that testing done well takes time and effort, but the cost of doing it outweighs the cost of not doing it.

Conclusion

Making APIs work is understanding your API strategy and defining your API Management program bringing focus and value to realize your overall business objectives.