August 28, 2020 The Future of API Management: Three Big Mistakes to AvoidAPI Lifecycle ManagementIs your API strategy what it needs to be? A digital transformation strategy requires much more than simply using APIs. As business opportunities and possibilities rapidly expand, enterprises risk being left behind in a cloud of digital disruption.Thought leadership from Akana recently hosted a webinar featuring guest speaker, Randy Heffner from Forrester Research, Inc., to discuss where API management will go in the future, and three big mistakes that prevent most firms from achieving maximum business impact with their API initiatives.We encourage you to listen to the full discussion in what was a fascinating hour by viewing the webinar below, but what will memorialize the high-level messaging in this blog – presenting the three big mistakes as laid out by Randy, and how the Akana solution solves these mistakes.The Future of API ManagementWe will let our guest speaker’s content stand for itself, in his own words, in the webinar embedded above. Watch the on-demand replay of the webinar to hear Randy’s thoughts on the following themes in the future of API management:Federated ecosystemsDigital business platformsBeyond RESTCloud-native SolutionsTeamsProcesses API Management Mistakes to AvoidAlso presented by our guest speaker are the three mistakes to avoid in API management:Missing API ecosystem valueMissing the need for agile governanceGetting stuck on REST APIsSee why Akana is a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2020 report.Download ReportAvoiding the 3 MistakesAfter Randy laid out the three mistakes listed above, Samir Ullal (Senior Manager – Product Management and Presales at Akana) discussed how you can address these challenges with the Akana API management platform.Ecosystem ConsiderationsAs organizations embark on their API strategies, they need to engage with their partners, which brings up a set of challenges. This is not something that is solved by must implementing an API management platform. There are questions that need to be asked beforehand about what that ecosystem should look like. Who are your partners? Do they all get the same set of APIs? Are there different sets of APIs for different partners? Are there different versions of APIs?There is more to it than the technology that enables the ecosystem – ultimately, these questions above determine what the platform needs to do.In the webinar, we discuss Akana’s ecosystem capabilities:Engaging with partners via API user portalsMulti-tenancy to manage partner organizationsDelegated administration in a B2B context"No-code" is significant hereManaging organizations with multiple API development and management teamsDifferent parts of your organization may be dealing with different ecosystems. You need to think about managing each lines of business, each of their ecosystems, the value they provide to that ecosystem, the data that is shared – all things that can be handled by Akana when it comes to managing ecosystems.Agile Governance ConsiderationsGovernance takes different forms. From an Akana perspective, governance is typically two-fold. First, there is governance around creating an API – requirements, design, specifications, and development. Secondly, once that API is developed, it will go through testing, QA, production, and deployment.For the latter, you could use a CI/CD process to promote into production, but on the first you will need collaborative governance. Your API management platform needs to be able to handle both of these examples, and needs to be flexible enough to change as the organization’s processes change.The Akana platform is powerful in this area, as this webinar discusses:Role based access controls across the organizationTaxonomyUse this as a design and governance guideVarying the governance process based on metadataDesign and development vs runtimeCollaborative governance vs thou shall not passImproves productivity Automation and integration with CI/CD processesBeyond RESTLastly, there are still a lot of different options out there in terms of what organizations have internally and externally. At Akana, there are still a lot of legacy systems out there with customers. This webinar discusses Akana’s strength in supporting these systems, with discussion of:Support for messaging platforms – JMS, AMQP, etc.Support for SOAPNewer technologies like GraphQLSecurity implications of GraphQLDocumentation Why Industry Leaders Across Verticals Use AkanaFor more detail on all the points presented above, we encourage you to view the on-demand replay of the webinar.Watch WebinarDownload The Forrester Wave™ For more on API Management, get your complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2020 report, authored by Randy Heffner, below.Read Report
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