The Future of API Management: Three Big Mistakes to Avoid

Is 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 Management

We 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 ecosystems
• Digital business platforms
• Beyond REST
• Cloud-native
  • Solutions
  • Teams
  • Processes

API Management Mistakes to Avoid

Also presented by our guest speaker are the three mistakes to avoid in API management:

1. Missing API ecosystem value
2. Missing the need for agile governance
3. Getting stuck on REST APIs

See why Akana is a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2020 report.

Download Report

Avoiding the 3 Mistakes

After 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 Considerations

As 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 portals
  • Multi-tenancy to manage partner organizations
  • Delegated administration in a B2B context
  • "No-code" is significant here
• Managing organizations with multiple API development and management teams

Different 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 Considerations

Governance 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 organization
• Taxonomy
  • Use this as a design and governance guide
• Varying the governance process based on metadata
  • Design and development vs runtime
  • Collaborative governance vs thou shall not pass
  • Improves productivity
• Automation and integration with CI/CD processes

Beyond REST

Lastly, 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 SOAP
• Newer technologies like GraphQL
  • Security implications of GraphQL
  • Documentation

Why Industry Leaders Across Verticals Use Akana

For more detail on all the points presented above, we encourage you to view the on-demand replay of the webinar.

Watch Webinar

Download 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