An API management platform has often been instrumental in helping businesses break through data silos. Enterprises have now realized the benefits of deploying an API ecosystem, and this has played a crucial role in keeping businesses operating smoothly.

Application programming interfaces have allowed businesses to free themselves from monolithic architecture and have exposed valuable services across customer, partner, and supplier channels. For your business to scale, it is essential that different applications start communicating with each other, and APIs are a driving force in this.

But you already know how your business can grow with the flexibility and interoperability of APIs. What you need right now is help in evaluating API platforms to organize the design, build, security and exposition of it all. Read on to learn how you can evaluate key capabilities and find the right API management platform for you.

API Platform Capability #1: Planning and design

A flawed API design could lead to problems such as security vulnerabilities, exposing sensitive data, neglecting access rights and group privileges, and more.

This is where API design and planning platform capabilities can help. As an enterprise, you need to clearly understand what your API should be capable of doing, and how it will work. Not knowing about the capabilities of your APIs could lead to poor designs.

There is an easier way of creating an API that meets your needs. The right API Management Platform will empower you with a no code or low code guided experience. Such a platform helps you design, document and test your APIs. Enterprises have the liberty to engage with API consumers at different stages of the API design lifecycle using a library of APIs, templates, examples, and connectors. With this approach, pre-built and reusable API fragments help develop APIs that suit your business needs.

These are the API design and planning capabilities you should look for:

• API Portfolio Management - Define your API program drivers by defining business goals and translating them into APIs.
• API Product Management - Scope your product objectives and give developers and partners freedom to leverage enterprise assets.
• Visual Editor - Cultivate design-first API development culture using a collaborative visual editor to prototype and share your API.
• Collaborative API Governance - Accelerate collaboration and adoption through common API design principles to standardize design styles across teams.
• Data Consistency - Create consistency by storing your team's common design components to be referenced and reused across your API portfolio.
• Revision Control - Plan features and releases better with versioning and start new projects using built-in revision management.
• Version Control - Reliable version control allows API teams to roll out new product lines or offerings.
• Change Alerts - Automatically track changes to your API, including breaking changes, new endpoints, improvements, and more.

API Platform Capability #2: Standardization and API governance

Consistency across your APIs doesn’t just help in building credibility of your products, but also becomes the most effective way to manage them. API governance is crucial to standardize the patterns, blueprints and templates of your API platform. Standardization across your API program will help reduce complexity, while increasing visibility and API architecture resiliency.

Standardizing API architecture on a single, centralized platform can give teams uninterrupted access to API documentation and coding standards. It also makes patterns, blueprints and API templates easily reusable, which saves time and money.

When you have the right API governance in place, it becomes easier to manage your strategies more effectively. The right API management platform will feature good API governance to provide clear visibility over your cross-organizational APIs and ensure that they work in accordance with the policies, regulations and contractual obligations.

API Platform Capability #3: Testing and deployment

Companies can benefit from API testing right at the production stage, even before it goes into deployment. This will ensure that live API endpoints are up and running, working fast and returning all the data that’s expected from them. When you’re testing and monitoring production endpoints, you can detect and fix problems even before customers, partners, or end users notice them. The right API management platform can let you chain together complex API transactions and workflows to create and run test cases, on-demand using Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) which increases deployment frequency and reduces downtime. Another key API platform capability is a workflow visualizer that will show your entire path to production in a single view while reducing your meantime to production.

API Platform Capability #4: Publishing and monitoring

As an API owner, there is a possibility that you will encounter higher outages, a disconnect between API documentation and production endpoints, and struggle to maintain high uptime for services. An API management platform should help ensure that your APIs perform according to expected standards.

If you’re looking for near real-time insights into API traffic and performance, robust API monitoring is the way to go. It can help you diagnose and resolve issues quickly. Alerts that notify you about unexpected changes in API traffic allow you to take preventive action before your customers are affected. In addition, continuous API monitoring helps diagnose errors and performance issues.

API Platform Capability #5: API Security

API security is complicated, but essential. Gartner has predicted that by 2022, APIs will be the primary attack vector. A survey from Salt Labs found a 681% increase in API attacks, with 95% of survey respondents saying they had been subject to an API attack in the last 12 months.

Organizations need to be protected from ever-evolving threats. However, they often don’t invest in the right API platforms. Most companies prefer to rely on old, legacy API solutions that have worked in the past but can’t withstand the new, evolving cyberattacks. Businesses don’t even know how vulnerable they are until after they have been compromised. This is why it is important that your organization doesn’t get distracted by the digital transformation promise.

The APIwiz design-first approach ensures developer productivity by reducing complexity. Our API management platform maintains a clear focus on API governance, reliability, security and compliance. We offer a scalable, unified API platform that allows enterprises to share their API configurations while controlling access and enforcing security policies. Sign up for our free 14-day trial and let us know if there’s anything you need!