Creating Agility With a Single Management & Analytics Dashboard For New Digital Services

The Problem: Breaking Down Digital Silos and Gaining Momentum In IT Transformation

The IT transformation program calls for group-wide integration. The goal is to simplify integration between applications and data. APIs are key to achieving this goal. To make APIs work effectively, the IT department devised what it calls the Group API Framework. The Group API Framework includes a Shared Service concept. In this approach, any IT asset that is API-enabled can be available as a shared service, open to use by any other system in the company.

If Division A wants to see transactions from Division B’s supply chain application, it can access the app as a Shared Service. The Shared Service approach has many IT benefits. It also creates many API security and management challenges. Any asset exposed through an API must be secured against improper use. Therefore, the company needed to control access to APIs carefully. This is all about ensuring security and staying on top of load levels.

In such a large and complex company, we had to consider excessive demands on API Shared Services. This could cause the IT asset to overheat and lose performance. In parallel, the API and app development workflows had to run as efficiently as possible. APIs and Shared Services can speed up app development. It becomes easier to build applications that integrate needed functionality through APIs rather than developing them from scratch.

New development modalities such as DevOps APIs and microservices could be implemented as well under the new Shared Services model. However, if the APIs involved were not managed well, there could be chaos. Or, an undesirable level of inefficiency.

Solution: Consolidating Secure, Manageable, Shared Services Into a Single Dashboard View

The IT management team recognized early on that the company needed an API Management solution if they wanted to realize their vision of Shared Services through the Group API framework. After reviewing several proposals, they selected the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version of the Akana API Gateway. They chose Akana partly based on the company’s credibility and API management track record with large enterprises. And because they needed to go beyond API basics.

The Akana API Gateway streamlines management, deployment, development, and operation of APIs. It enhances security and regulatory compliance through authentication, authorization, and audit capabilities. It provides central definition and management of security, routing, orchestration, mediation, auditing, threat protection, and operational governance policies. The Gateway enables enterprises to standardize API and service delivery with high security, performance, and availability.

The API Gateway provides real-time system monitoring. With it, users can access web-based dashboards to get real-time visibility into service and API performance, dependencies, and alert status. A powerful alert functionality keeps administrators aware of API operating conditions. An analytics dashboard, combined with out-of-the-box reports, gives users visibility into the performance of APIs and services from different perspectives, including department, partner, application contract API and service or operation.

The company liked the Akana API Gateway’s ability to execute policy hierarchy. Because the company manages hundreds of services and APIs, they often need to change policies in ways that affect services and APIs in different ways. The Gateway’s extensive security features ensure privacy of data in flight and at rest. The Gateway prevents Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, malformed messages or excessive XML/JSON depth and breadth. It can detect and prevent SQL, JavaScript or XPath/ XQuery injection attacks. The Gateway features a content firewall that protects against malicious content such as viruses in attachments. It can validate message content, including XML and JSON data structure, form, and query parameters.

Results: Accelerated Digital Service Release Timelines, Improved Security, and Greater Digital Agility 

The Gateway makes it possible for the company to develop and provision APIs for Shared Services securely and reliably. They can now create and manage APIs efficiently. The Gateway makes it possible to scale API-based integrations easily as well. It enables them to standardize API and service delivery with high security, performance, and availability. Specific benefits for the IT transformation program include:

• Faster app development with API support for DevOPs and Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).
• Easy deployment of API Portals for multiple operating units.
• Flexibility to define and manage APIs. Creating APIs with multiple interfaces using different standards like REST/XML, REST/JSON and SOAP with no extra development effort.
• The ability to leverage existing SOAP assets with bi-directional protocol transformation. The Gateway enables the company to convert existing SOAP or Plain-old-XML (POX) over MQ or JMS services into RESTful APIs with XML and/or JSON content.

Next Steps

The customer is now implementing the Akana SaaS API Gateway in the UK and Ireland. It will then deploy in other operating countries over the next two years. See for yourself how Akana can help with your scalability.

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