The Role of APIs for Business

An Application Programming Interface (API) is an intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. Without APIs, the digital experiences consumers have grown accustomed to, such as booking a hotel room or in car navigation, would not be possible. In recent years, API proliferation has grown exponentially, and they increasingly being used by companies and organisations to deliver digital transformation and be part of the emerging API economy.

By Paul Fisher
pf@kuppingercole.com

October 29, 2020

Content of Figures

Figure 1 The evolution of APIs
Figure 2 An example of how third-party developers can access Google’s APIs to integrate parts of Google Maps functionality into their own apps and services. As Google updates Maps, the public APIs will update the third-party app so it will be running the latest ve
Figure 3 APIs and Microservices (source: KuppingerCole).
Figure 4 Private, Partner and Public APIs. (source: KuppingerCole)
Figure 5 The best way to protect APIs and Microservices from unauthorized access is with an API Gateway and API Access Management platform.

1 Executive Summary

From what used to be a purely technical concept created to make developers’ lives easier, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have evolved int ...

This sing growth clearly indicates that APIs are no longer just “an IT thing” – they have a very tangible impact on nearly every business’s op ...

2 Highlights

Understand how APIs work and how they can deliver better connections between people, data, and applications
How APIs can bring business advantage ...

3 How APIs can work in an organization

At its simplest, an Application Programming Interface (API) provides a bridge between one application and another that wishes to share its functionali ...

The open nature of APIs has created a self-sustaining global ecosystem that benefits the creators of APIs and developers alike. A new API economy has ...

Public, partner or private API – what are differences in operation?

So far, we have discussed how APIs bring business advantage to organizations an ...

4 Preparing the organization for the API economy

An API ecosystem will do much to push an organization further along its journey to digital transformation. It will enable it to become a part of the A ...

5 APIs and Security

By now it should be clear that APIs offer many business advantages and a direct route into planned digital transformation for companies and organizati ...

By deploying API Access Management, IT management and security teams can apply existing usage policies based on identity and permissions of users, par ...

6 Recommendations

KuppingerCole would recommend that organizations investigate managing APIs within their infrastructure as soon as possible. It is unlikely that even t ...

7 Related Research

Leadership Compass: API Management and Security – 70311
Leadership Compass: Dynamic Authorization Management – 70966
Leadership Compass: Access Management and Federation – 70790
Advisory Note: The Open API Economy – 70352
Advisory Note: API Economy Ecosystem – 70625
Advisory Note: Connected Enterprise Step-by-step – 70999
Whitepaper: The Dark Side of the API Economy – 80019
Executive View: Forum Sentry API Security Gateway – 70930
Executive View: Ergon Airlock Suite – 72509
Executive View: Axway API Management for Dynamic Authorization Management (DAM) – 71184
Executive View: Amazon API Gateway – 71451
Executive View: WSO2 Identity Server – 80060
Executive View: Curity Identity Server – 80159