Issue link: https://axway.uberflip.com/i/1137730
2 axway.com Understanding the business climate for APIs and microservices Businesses face an accelerating pace of change and technological disruption. They want to transform themselves, offering customers a mobile experience, omni-channel relationships and beyond. We all know this. What's not so obvious to everyone, however, is how challenging it can be for IT to deliver the innovation needed to thrive in a disruptive world. The race to digital transformation invariably requires deep, secure integration between applications housed in multiple corporate entities and hosting environments. Transformation also demands a software development cycle far more rapid than anything that came before. To succeed, IT must balance agility, cost, responsiveness and security. Limitations in software architecture get in the way. Leading internet innovators, the 'unicorns' that change the world and reach new heights of business success, have shown that APIs and microservices provide an answer. They enable IT to innovate, with streamlined application integration and rapid, agile development taking advantage of deployment flexibility in the cloud, on premises or in a hybrid combination of the two. How technology adapts to the business climate Businesses seeking a transformation want to create exceptional experiences for customers and partners. They achieve this goal by enabling business capabilities and data to new modes of use. The results include innovative user experiences across channels and devices. Data analysis underpins it all—helping both IT and business stakeholders anticipate future needs. This quest has been the story of IT over the last 20 years. A series of industry-wide initiatives has tried to enable data and business capabilities through new usage patterns. The Service- Oriented Architecture (SOA), for example, was built using standards-based SOAP Web Services and IP protocols. It succeeded in opening up many previously monolithic, proprietary and tightly-coupled systems to integration. Though revolutionary in its own way, SOA proved too complex to implement broadly. APIs, and now microservices, are realizing the vision first espoused by SOA advocates. Through standards and universal norms of use, they make it possible to securely unlock data and expand application ecosystems with relative ease. The IT organization can manage the full API life-cycle to create, consume and control APIs. They can manage API policies at a granular level to optimize data access. Now, access is available to a vast array of enterprise files from any device anywhere, anytime regardless of where the files are stored. Addressing challenges in API and microservices management API and microservices enable businesses to build secure digital ecosystems of partners, suppliers and customers. The standards-based connections between systems make it possible for companies to easily onboard new partners, build APIs and devise partner API programs that harness external innovation. However, there have been some growing pains on the way to realizing the vision of the API- and microservice-powered enterprise. To some extent, APIs and microservices have been victims of their own success. Scale and complexity come with broad adoption. As each challenge has arisen, though, a solution has also emerged.