CITO Research
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Cloud-based API Management: Harnessing the Power of APIs
Introduction
It wasn’t long ago that the idea of making a company’s information assets and services
available to outside parties would make a CEO cringe. Not only are the most inno-
vative companies doing exactly that today, but they are seeing enormous
business value as a result. Companies are increasing their growth, gen-
erating revenue and accelerating innovation by sharing services via
application programming interfaces (APIs).
According to Harvard Business Review, Salesforce.com generates
50% of its revenue through APIs, while eBay generates 60% and
Expedia.com generates a whopping 90%. Externally published APIs
enable companies to break into markets and reach customers and
partners they never would’ve before. Perhaps an even bigger but harder
to measure impact is being achieved when companies expose APIs internally so
that dierent parts of the company can accelerate use of each other’s data and applications.
APIs have become crucial for supporting development of mobile apps, creating new kinds of
partner relationships, and promoting innovation. Whether you have an internal or external
focus, or a combination of the two, exposing services and information through APIs is not
without risk and diculties. In order to realize the business value of APIs, IT organizations
must rst address the technical challenges and risks associated with building, maintaining,
and managing them. This CITO Research paper explores how a cloud-based API manage-
ment platform can help.
Common API Requirements and Challenges
Industry expert John Musser has pointed out that APIs followed the same path to innovation
as websites. At rst, websites were a novelty, then a way to innovate, and nally a standard
tool used to solve many kinds of business problems. As APIs have evolved, it has become
clear that there are basic responsibilities to be met when publishing an API in any form.
When used ineptly, a broken or mismanaged API can expose information in unintended
ways. In the worst case, APIs that have not been managed well have been the source of
security breaches or data leaks (as have websites). Eventually a set of standard practices and
supporting tools emerged to allow any company to safely do business on the Web. The same
thing is happening with APIs.
Companies are
increasing their
growth, generating
revenue and accelerating
innovation by sharing
services via APIs
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To learn more about Azure API Management, check out http://aka.ms/AzureAPIM
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