Best API Management Tools

With an exploding number of applications taking over the digital world, companies are turning toward API management to expose more data so that they can provide more personalized app experiences for customers, partners, and internal users. APIs are creating exponential growth for companies and are enabling them to accomplish business goals faster than ever before. API management has proven to transform organizations by increasing efficiency, fostering innovation efforts, and helping them bring new services and products to market faster.

The tool that resides between a collection of backend services and a client is known as an API management gateway. Its programming is the single-entry point for back-end APIs and both internal and external microservices. An API management gateway enforces security, provides elastic scalability and high availability, and helps performance levels. By compiling all API requests from a client, an API gateway can determine which services are necessary and combines them into a single and seamless experience for the user.

The benefits of API management include:

• Improved customer experience: API management helps companies create a rich and personalized customer experience because it is easier to deliver new levels of convenience and responsiveness, thus enabling companies to create value-added services.

• Security: Accessibility makes APIs vulnerable. With an API management solution, sensitive data is protected and permissions are assigned and managed to avoid any security oversights that would otherwise be challenging to manage at the enterprise level. Additionally, API security protects your company from internal and external threats. When critical business functionality is exposed to customers, an API management platform can control levels of access for each app to verify identification, and can also detect anomalies to eliminate fraud.
• Scalability: In today’s day and age, companies and their employees interact with apps and data on a constant basis. API management increases accessibility, decreasing the technical burdens associated with the typical API lifecycle.
• API usage: An API management solution should provide insights about a company’s API consumers, making strategic business decisions easier. By gaining a deeper understanding of usage patterns, and other analytics such as device types or geographical information, API management can help companies adjust business strategies to meet customer demands.
• Agility: API management makes it possible to have an easily adaptable and agile ecosystem. Having an API management system helps companies create APIs in less time while simultaneously delivering services much faster. By being able to create new services quickly, customer satisfaction increases, and businesses benefit from more profits.
• Flexible ecosystem: In order to succeed with a digital transformation, it is essential to have an ecosystem that lends itself to adaptability, innovation, and flexibility. An API management system is critical to an ecosystem, since it is the solution to helping enterprises achieve the business agility they need.
• Leverage legacy systems: Organizations do not have to do away with existing legacy systems that may already be deeply embedded into their enterprise. Instead, legacy systems can be made API-accessible and can be used to only expose the legacy system’s functionality to internal and external stakeholders. API management makes it possible to translate outdated security protocols to more modern protocols that are standard and user-friendly.
• Easily accessible services: With an API management system, you can guarantee a seamless user experience for your customers by making services accessible anytime, from any location.

• Simple configuration: API management is easy to configure and can be applied to either new or existing APIs in a uniform manner.
• Compliance: Compliance standards tend to be very strict for a lot of industries. API management ensures that API use is compliant with government and organizational standards.

To evaluate the success of your API management efforts, it is important to consider these key performance objectives:

1. Speed: Throughput and access latency can be used to measure speed. Throttling or caching can influence speed.
2. Flexibility: For developers, flexibility means greater effort as well as cost when adopting APIs.
3. Dependability: Simply put, dependability relates to the availability of an API to developers and is measured by downtime and quotas. How often an API is available for use and how many API calls a developer can make within a specific time frame makes its management more predictable. Developers need it to be easy to find APIs within the organization.
4. Quality is the rate at which the API’s behavior meets a developer’s expectations. Ideally, an API management platform should reduce the amount of time it takes for a developer to adopt an API.
5. Cost: Measuring costs is a way to get the best value for your money.

Common features of an API management tool include:

• Security
• Sandbox environment
• High availability
• Usage reporting
• Backward compatibility
• Transformation of URLs and data
• Dashboards and analytics
• Routing and proxying
• Policies and restrictions
• Developer tools (like documentation generators)