With so many online tools available today, businesses need an effective way to work across multiple platforms, advancing their operations and streamlining their processes. To achieve such results requires knowledge about application programming interfaces (APIs) and expertise in integrating them into existing IT infrastructure. Today’s API imperative is part of a broader move by the enterprise to open architectures—exposing data, services, and transactions in order to build new products and offerings and also to enable more efficient, newer business models. But this expansion of channels inherently increases the permeability of an organization’s network, which can create new seams and a broader attack surface that can be exploited as a result of new vulnerabilities.
Analyzing customer journeys is often the best way to identify API opportunities. One bank pulled business and technology professionals into a joint team and tasked them with identifying where APIs could help resolve several longstanding customer pain points. This approach can be a good middle ground for extending the life of your backend systems while you assess different scenarios for their transformation.
APIs: Powering Digital Transformation in Payment Operations
Internet of Things, Machine learning and wearables are just some of the tech trends poised to change the enterprise IT landscape in the future. ● Prioritize security and privacy to safeguard sensitive data and protect against cyber threats. Some APIs are intuitive enough for people without coding https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ experience to use successfully. One great experiment would be to use your organization’s vulnerability scans against a deliberately vulnerable API. Set up a secure test environment with a vulnerable API like OWASP’s crAPI and see how effective your organization’s vulnerability scans are against it.
- They must incorporate the business perspectives to avoid risking the support of business stakeholders,” says Shameen Pillai, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.
- They often favor specific integration tools and have certain areas of expertise.
- As a standalone entity, an API doesn’t have much value, but when paired with another program or system (or — better yet — multiple other programs and systems), it connects the pieces of a bigger picture.
- The challenge was to convince long-established customers—some with contracts dating back a century—that moving away from paper-based data delivery would make it easier to do business with the company.
- Legacy API creation methods including created by a third party, maintenance of the API falls on development or IT team in the enterprise can be an exhausting and time-consuming effort.
Vulnerable machines like crAPI are riddled with the top API security vulnerabilities. Business logic flaws are features of an application that can be used maliciously because they’re vulnerable by design. In other words, these flaws are present in an application’s code and are exceedingly difficult to detect for most automated scans. Vulnerability scans that weren’t designed for API vulnerabilities will result in false-negative findings. False negative vulnerability results are one of the most dangerous threats to plague an information security program. This information was easy to retrieve and no special hacking tools were required—just knowledge of how to use a browser to query and modify data elements.
A framework for managing an extended and connected workforce
Like any product or service, a successful API program requires a thoughtfully managed adoption campaign backed by rigorous performance management. The best approaches begin with the initial customer and developer pilots, advance to formal production requirements, then orchestrate and oversee the wider-adoption push to achieve critical mass. APIs can connect internal systems relatively simply, allowing access to data—even when it’s buried deep within legacy IT systems—quickly and repeatedly. Merely growing your technical portfolio of isolated apps and products won’t give you an edge. Building a tightly linked, collaborative ecosystem of external and internal partnerships will.
APIs must be tested from an adversarial standpoint that mimics how they would be exploited by a malicious user. An API penetration test is one of the best ways to discover common vulnerabilities and business logic flaws. Salt Security database and API integration surveyed nearly 200 security, application, and DevOps professionals about their API concerns in February 2021. The results showed 91% of organizations involved in the survey suffered an API-related problem within the last year.
What Is API Integration?
An open and API-forward architecture can be well suited to address and help standardize on the implementation of core security, monitoring, and resiliency requirements in computing environments. Cyber risk capabilities made available to applications, developers, partners, and third parties alike through a standardized API set can help address security policy mandates, minimum security and privacy guidelines, and compliance obligations. APIs can also improve an organization’s resiliency posture and enable rapid updates when new threats are identified—within a matter of hours, not days—thereby helping to reduce costs, operational overhead, and overall time to detect and respond. The connective capability of APIs allows companies to access new value outside the business. API developers, for example, can create innovative products and services that tie into a company’s systems. Advanced API capabilities allow developers to create a richer customer experience by pulling together a deeper array of data sets (rather than simply scraping data).
Assemble a group of experienced QA engineers who understand your goals and are adept at testing different aspects of the software. Quality Assurance (QA) is the secret sauce that ensures a software product’s success. Much like a chef perfecting a recipe, crafting a kickass QA strategy is the key to serving up a software masterpiece.
AT&T’s lean, mean API machine
Traditional approaches to wrap specific chunks of functionality within a more complex code base succeeded in exposing a transaction or data element as an interface or API. However, they didn’t allow individual APIs to scale or evolve independent of the whole. Microservices look to break larger applications into small, modular, independently deployable services. This approach turns the rhetoric of SOA into a modernized application architecture and can magnify APIs’ impacts. Such a hybrid platform provides the enterprise all the technology capabilities to integrate data and applications across any on-premises or multicloud environment for internal or external consumption. Key capabilities of the hybrid platform are end-to-end API life cycle management, application integration, data integration, and high-speed and high-volume data transfer.
In this article, we discussed an API-first approach to integration projects that reduce the project costs and timelines, increase collaborative work between teams, and improve the overall quality as well as room for future expansions. Also, we discussed how we can formulate this approach as a strategy with a seven-step execution plan. Gartner says, through 2020, integration work will account for 50% of the time and cost of building a digital platform.
Featured in Development
Instead, many distributed individual departments are building their own solutions, assembling their own platforms, by pulling together best-of-breed solutions that handle specific tasks and data sets. With an API integration platform, departments can connect the cloud apps and tools available. Our experience with services and APIs has been crucial to building AWS, which turns everything—whether it’s a data center, outbound service, network, or database—into a software component. If we hadn’t experienced the process ourselves, we would have been unable to understand either the value it would have for our customers or the needs our customers would have to build, run, and evolve in such an environment. We realized this technology could help Internet-scale companies be successful, and it completely transformed the technology industry. Like many financial institutions, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), a 150-year-old institution, is building new capabilities to help it meet customers’ increasingly sophisticated needs.
They track the effectiveness of their API strategy diligently and holistically. According to research by Apigee, successful companies differ from lower performers in that they clearly define and measure a combination of business success metrics. These include revenue and consumption metrics such as the number of developer calls. According to a Harvard Business Review article, Salesforce has generated half of its revenue to through APIs, while Expedia.com has generated a whopping impressive 90% in recent years. APIs have become so essential to businesses that 85% consider web APIs and API-based integration fundamental to their business strategy and continued success.