The projections show the global API market will reach USD 6263.00 million by 2028. It’s no surprise, given the growing popularity of APIs. Modern businesses extensively use APIs to unlock data and, in turn, create collaborative applications and connected customer experiences. APIs have been around us in some capacity, but with the exponential increase in cloud-based applications, they are now being produced and consumed at scale.
The increased requirement to manage API traffic has created the need for API management that would provide visibility into its components. Let’s explore API management and why you should implement it in your organization.
What is API Management?
API management is the process of creating, securing, publishing, and monitoring APIs. When you have a few APIs to deal with, you can easily embed security in the code and monitor their usage. However, as the numbers increase, most organizations (88%) run into management challenges, which is why API management has become necessary.
API management gives you centralized access to your enterprise APIs, enabling you to easily enforce security policies, control access, and collect usage statistics, so you can proactively debug any issues.
API management is the key to adopting a company-wide API strategy. It encourages API-led development and data exchange, which allows businesses to launch new initiatives faster and create seamless customer experiences.
What Does API Management Include?
API management provides businesses with the core services to effectively design, manage, and monitor APIs. Any good API management platform, such as Astera API Management solution, has the following capabilities:
- API Design: It provides the framework to start with creating, testing, and managing customized API flows.
- API Security: It authenticates and enforces API security policies at runtime. API management platforms ensure improved data security and greater protection through authentication, authorization, and policy-driven firewalls.
- API Analytics: It allows users to monitor API usage, load, and other vital metrics and help them understand the success and health of the APIs.
- Developers Portal: An API store or community site that includes API documentation, tutorials, and a marketplace to subscribe to APIs and manage their subscription keys.
Benefits of an API Management Solution
Investing in an API management solution is a wise choice. Here is what a tool can do for you:
Security
APIs allow you to share critical enterprise data with internal and external partners, so maintaining security is one of the most important activities of any API management program. According to a Postman survey conducted on 37,000 developers and API professionals, 20% of respondents reported that API security incidents or breaches happen at least once per month at their organizations.
API management solutions come with extensive security and authorization features, which help ensure that your APIs and data remain protected.
An API management solution also gives an insight into real-time API activity, which allows you to identify potential security vulnerabilities in networks, operating systems, and API components beforehand. As a result, you can pinpoint the root cause of security issues and deal with them proactively.
Agility
API Management enables you to design, test, publish, manage, and analyze all APIs in a single platform. Modern API management solutions are fully-automated, saving you time with manual tasks such as testing, deployment, or generating documentation. With an automated solution, you can seamlessly create and publish any endpoint, reducing costs and time to market.
Additionally, API management tools improve API usability, so you can rapidly launch new initiatives to support changing business requirements.
Automation
Developers spend a considerable amount of their time designing, testing, deploying, and managing APIs. According to the 2022 Postman State of API Report, over 40% of developers spend more than 20 hours a week working with APIs — almost a third of which is spent creating APIs through coding and programming. The manual work can be an enormous burden on IT resources, especially when managing APIs on a large scale.
Automated API management solutions, such as Astera’s, accelerate API creation and publishing by automating most activities. With manual tasks out of the way, you can spend more time on strategic tasks.
Analytical Insights
A crucial part of API management is API analytics. A modern tool API tool comes with dashboards that give you an overview of key API metrics such as runtime statistics, API traffic, response times, and spikes. You can use this data and insights to troubleshoot issues and guide future API development.
API Versioning
As trends and requirements change, APIs need to evolve. An API management solution ensures that you can make changes to your APIs without disrupting the underlying system. API management tools also have governance features that make it easier to keep a tab on different versions of APIs.
How Astera Simplifies API Management
Astera offers a complete API lifecycle management and integration solution. The tool’s powerful built-in functionalities and visual drag-and-drop interface reduce API management to a few clicks.
Using Astera API Management solution, you can rapidly connect internal and external API endpoints and publish them as APIs within minutes. By packing all powerful functionalities in one tool, Astera API Management allows businesses to deliver new solutions faster.
Astera API Management solution has the following capabilities:
- API Design: The tool has a vast library of sources, destinations, transformations, and built-in query parameters. You can also use this to orchestrate data or task-intensive API Pipelines. The designer also has a mature API consumption component using which you can integrate outside APIs, such as payment services, social media APIs, CRM, and ERP products,
- API Testing: Astera supports instant data preview, making design time testing easier. Once you have designed your API, you can immediately deploy it for further testing with one click.
- API Publishing: Publishing is a simple process with ADS. You can effortlessly publish API services and integrations in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments with just a few clicks.
- API Security: Astera has a built-in security framework with authorization and authentication features that lets you leverage bearer tokenization and implement access control.
- API Management: Astera features a centralized wizard that allows you to manage the critical elements of your API lifecycle. You can use it to gain API visibility, modify, activate and deactivate endpoints, and conduct run time tracing.
- API Monitoring: With Astera, you can get extensive information on your APIs, including API reports, API dashboards, and logs.
- Governance: Astera provides a centralized repository for all data artifacts. Some salient governance features include secure systems, lineage and impact analysis, version control, and sharing data artifacts.
Integrating your APIs is essential to any enterprise API strategy. By using Astera API Management solution, you can deliver the best possible API management experience and turn API integration from a challenge into a strategic growth opportunity.
Are you interested in adopting an enterprise-wide API-first strategy to create collaborative applications and manage, access, and collect data necessary for decision-making? Schedule a demo to learn more about our unified code-free API lifecycle management solution.
