How a Fortune 500 Company Delivers Better Customer Experiences With Akana

The Challenge: Meeting the Needs of a Growing Developer Community

Developers need to be able to easily find and use APIs in their products. So, the Fortune 500 company built an API platform with a developer portal to expose these tools and technologies. 

This portal enables them to publish externally-facing APIs that provide valuable capabilities. App developers can embed these into applications to help streamline their users’ lives.

These include:

• Secure authentication and identity services: Two factor authentication strengthens security — and protects confidential information.
• Loyalty point balance and redemption: Easily view and consume loyalty points. These are accrued consuming the company’s services.
• Credit promotions: Get a personalized list of current promotions and offers.

The company will continue to extend the range of APIs to meet the fast growing needs of its developer community. And they need to go beyond API basics.

The Solution: Akana

The APIs the company publishes must be secure, reliable, and easy to find and consume. And they must also be able to sustain the level of traffic generated by popular apps used by millions of customers.

Akana enables this with two key integrated features:

• API gateways: Akana provides a network of API gateways. The company’s developers use the gateways to securely and reliably expose capabilities as services and APIs. This is done both internally and externally.
• API portal: A portal that external developers can use to easily find and consume the company’s APIs.

The API lifecycle is a key part of API management, and the portal and gateway play a big role in the lifecycle. 

Why Akana?

This Fortune 500 company purchased Akana to provide a high-performance, reliable platform for:

• RESTful API design.
• Security policy enforcement.
• SLA and throughput management.
• Developer engagement.

The company selected the Akana platform over other vendors for several reasons.

Akana delivered the best performance, scale, and richness of features and functionality. And it delivered on the company's required deployment automation capabilities.

Plus, they chose Akana to deploy in the cloud and leverage cloud APIs. The company deploys the products into its own Amazon VPC instances, using Akana’s Docker image with Amazon EC2 Container Server. This closely models the deployment Akana uses in the SaaS platform. By following this deployment pattern, the company ensures seamless scaling as needed. And they maintain compliance with their own internal security policies.

The company’s platform is in production handling live traffic. They continue to roll out more APIs — and they've planned a rich roadmap of new services.

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The Results

The Fortune 500 company succeeds with Akana. Here's how Akana made a difference.

Protection From External Threats

Most of the APIs the Fortune 500 company publishes need to be delivered securely. This is both in terms of the infrastructure hosting the API and the API interface itself. 

Akana protects the company’s applications from external threats. And it provides state-of-the-art API security. The gateway offers comprehensive protection against OWASP top ten threats including cross site scripting (XSS), cross site request forgery (CSRF), injection, and session management. It also provides antivirus scanning and strong cryptographic protection.

The company uses Akana to implement:

• OAuth: Akana supports OAuth. The company uses Akana to authenticate users and authorize access to all APIs.
• Throttling: Every app has its own contract with the gateway. This ensures that each app can only consume an agreed up amount of traffic from each API.

Positive Customer Experiences

The Fortune 500 company needs to ensure that its APIs perform extremely well. This keeps customers happy. It enables them to scale to support the needs of a rapidly growing user base. Plus, the APIs are distributed globally to provide local access to minimize network latency for global users.

The company uses Akana for:

• Caching and paging: Optimize the performance of APIs. Especially for mobile APIs and apps. 
• Distribution and routing: Publish API endpoints around the globe. And manage the API as a single entity. Akana provides a single set of central API analytics and usage data.

More Developer Engagement

A critical part of any API platform is the ability to provide developers with a self-service platform they can use to find and easily consume APIs.

Akana makes it easy with:

• API documentation: Akana dynamically generates Swagger documentation for all the APIs. And it provides additional downloadable documents, including helpful implementation guides.
• App provisioning: Developers can create their own app definitions and request access to APIs with specific quotas and service-levels.
• API testing: Developers can send test requests from a custom test client. Or they can use the testing features built in to the API docs.

Be Like This Fortune 500 Company

See for yourself how Akana delivers comprehensive security, improves external developer engagement, and makes it easier to consume and use APIs.

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