Five reasons to use an API Management solution to manage your third-party APIs

Third-party APIs are exploding in importance and organizations are leveraging them with great success. For example, Amazon.com released its API so that website developers could more easily access Amazon’s product information. Let’s say an organization is building a website where they can post direct links to Amazon products with updated prices and an option to “buy now.” This avoids them having to write this piece of functionality as the Amazon takes care of it.

Quicker results

Similarly, every SaaS provider is building its own APIs, which is leveraged for a quicker time to market. As organizations keep leveraging more of these APIs and there is proliferation, managing your third-party APIs can be a challenge—or a straight-up pain—without the right tools in place. Let’s talk about five reasons to use an API Management solution to manage your third-party APIs.

Third-party APIs

• Harmonize APIs
  • An API Management solution will help normalize disparate Security-Protocols across various third-party APIs into a common corporate standard leveraging security mediation policies.
  • With various third-party APIs, there could be different message formats, namely SOAP or REST. The API Management solution provides a standard way to transform disparate message types into the standard format.
• Catalog APIs
• API Management provides the right way to catalog your APIs. These APIs are available in a catalog.
• All the methods become available in the API Catalog and are able to be reused by other business projects.
  • When done properly, it will avoid point-to-point integration.
  • This enables self-service for business departments.
  • With documentation features, departments can add their own documentation
  • Provides the ability to control API consumption to various third-party cloud-services on a per-application basis.
  • Increases adoption, which results in overall increased agility.
• Corporate Standard Security
  • You can’t trust the security offered by the third-party provider. Applying corporate standard policies to third-party APIs ensures proper corporate standards.
• Centralized location to store corporate credentials for third-party APIs.
  • Instead of having credentials stored in each individual application that must be integrated, the API Management provides a central location to store any corporate credentials.
• Decouple the API original third-party APIs from the internal API.
  • As the consumer is using an interface via API Management, it is also possible to switch the implementation of the third-party cloud provider to a different provider. Don’t worry about the implementation since it provides the interface.

READ MORE: API Catalogs are all about innovation.

An API Management solution can provide you with a single end-to-end enterprise API platform that not only enables you to externalize your own services but also manages the consumption of third-party services.