Expanding and providing enterprise application services
Today we would like to share with you an interesting topic related to the integration and extension of enterprise applications. Have you ever heard of the word API? API stands for Application Programming Interface, which stands for Application Programming Interface.
APIs are a great way to integrate and extend your enterprise solutions. However, the more such APIs you have, the harder they are to manage and monitor. You have to worry about things like security, performance, scalability, documentation, version control, etc.
Is it at all easy to manage and share enterprise API services in a secure and scalable environment and moreover in a Cloud environment ? SAP API Management is one way to solve this.
SAP API Management is a Cloud solution from SAP that allows you to publish, promote and oversee your APIs in a secure and scalable environment. SAP API Management works on the principle of “API proxies”, which are an abstract layer on top of your existing enterprise services. In addition, they allow you to define security policies, collect and analyze statistics about the usage of your APIs, and control access to them. SAP API Management is part of the SAP Integration Suite for Integrations solution, which offers comprehensive solutions for integrating, extending, and upgrading business processes.
SAP API Management as a Cloud Service enables secure publishing and management of services from individual customer IT systems. Services published in this way can be used by different applications or directly by users.
However, their use does not end there. API Management can also be used for system integration, i.e. system-to-system integration. In this way, API management becomes a full-fledged tool for connecting other customer or partner systems, where their system can use these services as needed. Services published in this way can be used to read data, update or write new data, of course if your services provide these functions. In order to be in complete control of your services, it is the API management that provides a central point where you, as their provider, can define your rules for accessing and consuming them. Using this tool, you can even set selected services as chargeable.
Due to the possible public availability of services, such services must also meet the highest security requirements. The API management itself completely masks the IT systems that provide these services. Further security features are key protection of the exposed services, additional authentication or a check on the source IP address of the client.
