As the vision of the connected enterprise comes to life, APIs are becoming extremely sought-after. By enabling two or more applications, platforms, or systems to communicate and interact with one another using a set of protocols, APIs help streamline workflows, share data, and improve business productivity.
But setting up and managing APIs is no easy feat. This has caused the demand and market for API as a Service to skyrocket. Read on to learn everything you ever wanted to know about API as a Service.
What Is API as a Service?
Just like any software as a service offering, API as a Service provides organizations with cutting-edge API integration platforms that can be used to design and share custom APIs. By providing secure and reliable ways to manage and share data between different systems, API as a Service providers offer out-of-the-box integrations to automate integration tasks between different apps and systems.
Since such platforms help organizations build integrations without writing complicated code, organizations can use customizable templates to automate commonly used tasks, allowing anyone and everyone to automate workflows – regardless of the level of technical knowledge.
If you want to enable continuous interoperability across major platforms and use cases, you need to take advantage of the rich features that modern API as a Service vendors offer. Since they are built to be consumed in a variety of ways, the offering ensures you aren’t locked into a specific user interface or workflow and can offer seamless experiences to your users across apps, platforms, and systems.
Why Do You Need API as a Service?
Although APIs have become extremely important, API development is a cumbersome process with several aspects to take care of. From ensuring compatibility to implementing security protocols, interfacing data, and monitoring communications — API development requires the expertise of highly skilled professionals who aren’t easily available.
Opting for API as a Service instead is a great way to get access to tools and capabilities to help with API integrations. Using the service, businesses can easily overcome the many difficulties of building robust APIs while driving all the attention to building the product rather than writing complex code to connect it with other applications.
With API as a Service, enterprises can:
- Leverage out-of-the-box integrations to enable seamless communication and data sharing across the enterprise.
- Make use of pre-built templates and services to customize APIs based on specific business requirements.
- Minimize the effort and time spent in building APIs from scratch or managing and maintaining complex integrations.
- Eliminate the need to invest in costly hardware and software to enable new-age connections.
- Make the most of microservices-based API architecture to quickly and efficiently spin up new APIs.
- Ensure that APIs are constantly updated with the latest authentication and security features and capabilities.
- Streamline a bunch of API-related tasks from data storage and management to API provisioning, documentation, and version control.
- Get end-to-end support for API lifecycle management, including access to tools to design, publish, and monitor API usage.
- Leverage API monetization capabilities to streamline API billing and enable seamless and efficient usage-based pricing.
- Get access to an array of API services that can be built, tested, modified, eliminated, or replicated independently.
What Factors Should You Keep in Mind While Evaluating a Vendor?
API as a Service helps save time and effort in development by allowing developers to focus on more relevant aspects of API design. By ensuring all integrations are secure and reliable before being released to the public, the service helps with development and management of robust APIs that can be shared across the organization.
But with so many vendors today offering API as a Service, carefully assessing their capabilities is critical. Here are some factors you should keep in mind while evaluating an API as a Service vendor:
- Check for vendor experience and expertise in developing APIs in your industry.
- Evaluate vendors on their API-first approach and gauge the methodologies and frameworks they use to satisfy business requirements.
- Verify the efforts vendors put in making APIs scalable, customizable, and reusable
- Validate vendors’ approach toward API governance, including how they design and enforce API standards and security policies.
- Assess their support models and confirm if they offer helpdesk or self-service capabilities for quick resolution of issues.
- Check how different vendors deal with API documentation and assess if they maintain updated copies of the purpose, functionality, and inputs required for each API.
Conclusion
Whether you realize it or not, third-party APIs have a significant role to play in driving the overall user experience. These scalable developer services are what enable businesses to seamlessly integrate everything from SMS and email to payments, voice search, bots, and more.
But given how complex the development and management of APIs can be, engaging with a partner who provides unmatched API as a Service capabilities is a great way to make the process of building, testing, and deploying your API services more reliable, efficient, and cost-effective.
