How organisations can bolster digital transformation through robust API

APIs—application programming interfaces—are becoming ubiquitous in today’s business world. By facilitating the integration of software applications and systems and allowing for a seamless exchange of data, they drive digital business and transformation. However, with the explosive use of APIs, businesses face the challenges of becoming overwhelmed by them and falling behind competitors who implement strong API management. As businesses grow, keeping track of all APIs, right from creating, managing, securing, and monetising them, can become a problem.

We recently hosted a webinar in association with IBM on how organisations can secure and manage APIs through their entire lifecycle across multiple cloud and on-premises environments to power digital transformation and create secure digital ecosystems, by leveraging API management through IBM API Connect (also available as SaaS on AWS).

The webinar was joined by an esteemed panel of experts like Ron Puno, Chief Technology and Transformation Officer, UnionDigital Bank, Ryan B, Technical Director, Strategic Alliances, Noname Security, Claudio Tag, Chief Architect, IBM Automation Asia Pacific, IBM, and Roy Derksis, IBM StepZen Graph Server, IBM.

Here’s what they shared.

Challenges organisations face in managing APIs and their lifecycle

Tag kickstarted the discussion by sharing that one of the common misconceptions when it comes to API management is that the creation and exposure of APIs is the same thing as API management – but in reality, it’s much more than that. The challenging part is the lifecycle management. Gartner recently talked about having to treat APIs like products, therefore managing the API lifecycle equates to managing APIs as a product.

According to Tag, organisations need to build a lot of things on top of simple API exposure. First includes enabling consumers to access the data in a self-service fashion from discovery to consumption. Everything should be at their fingertips so that data consumption happens as they want without having to get authentication or credentials to get through organisational security. He outlined the main challenges that organisations face in API management, which are:

Making versions of APIs — In order to introduce a new functionality or provide a new piece of data, organisations can’t just make a breaking change leaving consumers refactoring their applications. Versioning APIs provides consumers a choice at the functionalities they want to adopt through the APIs.

Visibility of APIs — A lot of shadow IT departments are creating unmanaged APIs within organisations that are sometimes also invisible, which can be exploited by malicious threat actors. Without visibility, strong API management is impossible.

API security — Today, one of the main topics when it comes to the API economy is API security. It’s not just policy-driven security where there is a defined access control policy implemented, it’s how organisations can adapt to those policies based on consumer behaviour, changes in the landscape, or the security posture of an organisation, so that they can continuously follow the security requirements of the consumers and their data.

Validating Tag’s point of treating APIs as an asset, Ron emphasised that all of the banking services UnionDigital Bank provides in the various consumer’s app environments is possible only through an effective API management lifecycle. It’s therefore important for organisations to focus on how they view their APIs. Ron added, “They’re not merely data points for connectivity, they have risen the ranks now and are essentially assets and services that are offered bottomline.”

How organisations are managing multiple APIs and outlining the role of AI in API management

How organisations are managing their various APIs is significant because of the scale that is involved. Five or even ten years ago, API management was relatively simple because the exposure was limited. Now that organisations are interconnected and the way apps communicate is through APIs, it’s all complex. This overnight explosion of the need to create a number of APIs to expose services and functionalities is exponentially increasing over time.

Ron deliberated on the key areas the digital bank is looking at API management and mentioned:

• API governance: A few years ago, developers would write APIs in their own ways, exposing endpoints in different ways, but they intended well. However, now with the velocity of API creation, developers need a standardisation and governance by default and built-in while they are designing their APIs. Therefore, an API governance is essential, and if it comes baked-in or semi-baked in the platform where they are building the…