What is API Management?
API management is the process of complete API administration cycle which includes the creation and publishing of APIs, applying different usage policies of the APIs and overall reporting of the usage and performance of the APIs.
Nowadays, API-led connectivity is the new way to communicate with customers and partners.
API Management Involves:
- Creation and exposure of APIs
- Categorization of APIs
- Enforcing usage policies of APIs
- Controlling the consumer community of APIs
- Reporting and analysis of the APIs
- Documentation of the APIs
Components of API Management:
Generally, API Management platform uses the following three components:
1) An API Platform: The platform to create and edit APIs and configuring APIs for the developers and apps. Here you can create API policies for existing APIs or create a single API out of the box from a combination of APIs. The security policy of an API can be set from this component
2) API Analytics: Use to track performance and usage reports of the APIs. The dashboard provides powerful tools to track the IP of the consumer as well as measure the latency of the APIs
3) Developer Services: A tool to manage API developers. You can add/remove developers and create a developer portal to add/delete different applications, which are available in an organization.
A Use Case of API Management:
Consider a case when you are a B2B product company and your application uses APIs from different third-party applications as well as your own application APIs. Using API management, your customers will be able to create, edit and configure different APIs of the third-party apps as per their requirements and provide the same to their customers. This will make your product highly customizable for the end users which now has the power to customize your APIs as per their requirements. Also, the security policy suggests usage of API management so that the consumers of an API get managed and restricted access to that API.
How APPSeCONNECT leverages API Management:
APPSeCONNECT is an iPaaS platform that integrates different applications used by SMEs as well as Enterprise organizations. The apps include ERPs, eCommerce stores, Marketplaces, POS etc.
The APPSeCONNECT API Management platform facilitates the following:
A cloud-based API management platform to create, edit and configure APIs of 3rd party applications
- Create a new API from an existing API or a combination of APIs
- Enforcing security policy for an API consumption like the IP limits, usage limits and data access limits. For e.g. you can block a user using their IP addresses
- Enable onboarding developers and assign them different apps for API creation and management
- Creation of API proxies, which helps to create a wrapper for the original web service which has a restricted access.
- Management of complete API mappings for data integration
Now, you can easily integrate your business applications like ERP, CRM, Ecommerce store, Marketplace, Shipping and POS Systems to automate the business process!
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