Here’s Why API Integrations Are Necessary for Public Safety

Are you agile? I’m not asking if you can perform a back-bend without ending up in hospital.

What I want to know is, can your company quickly scale up to a digital environment and add anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 new users a day?

Many organizations cannot, and we are seeing them fall by the wayside. The problem? They have not yet digitalized sufficiently to be agile. An agile organization can respond to events, can turn on a dime, to address the situation by directing more activity online, or by altering supply chains to proactively manage inventories. It can scale up quickly, and then back down again, to remain resilient while also controlling costs.

What if you could respond to new trends (or emergency pandemics) faster because your IT environment was designed for innovation and agility? That could help you differentiate your offering, find new business models and revenue opportunities. The way you can do this is though APIs and microservices.

APIs, coupled with microservices, power digital applications, providing the data and services that make digital business possible. And, because you need to know who is using your APIs in order to ensure security and visibility, an API management platform is not a nice-to-have, it is an absolute necessity.

Control Your Projects in 1 Place

With cloud-native architectures gaining momentum, API management platforms must be able to manage combined microservices-plus-APIs implementations. Cloud-hosted microservices provide the reliability (in excess of 99.99%) and the scalability (which cannot be predicted at the time of application deployment) that mobile, remote, edge and device applications require.

You also need governance over your APIs and microservices to control your projects. Without an enterprise plan for APIs and API management, every project is a one-off. You cannot simply launch APIs one-by-one and hope that they work together. (There’s that word Hope again.) An API management solution manages the relationships between third-party API providers and API users. Without one, you have a chaotic mishmash of separate APIs, security risks, and you cannot scale up your user base.

For example, a global tire manufacturer found that multiple departmental groups all over the company were creating their own APIs. The company had no control, causing disruption to its business. So, it decided to standardize on a single approach – an API Management platform from webMethods. It can now sell tires all over the world through third-party APIs with centralized control. If there is a spike in demand, it can handle the increase – it can add the hypothetical 10,000 users per day because it has a bulletproof API Management platform.

Choosing the Best API Management Platform

This is where webMethods API Management platform comes in, with AppMesh for managing microservices in the cloud. In The Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2020, we received the highest score in the current offering category. And we believe AppMesh (referenced in the Forrester Wave report) is our differentiator; it shows how we make building applications on microservices that are accessed by APIs easier to manage at the application level.

AppMesh is the nerve center that brings application awareness, a whole new level of control and visibility. It fully delivers on the promise of digital business models that embrace the Internet of Things. Yes, it’s kind of geeky, but it plays to simplifying digital transformation and helps companies build their digital products and services for improved innovation.

As stated in the Forrester report: “Software AG’s solution did well across a strong majority of our criteria, particularly in its portal, API user engagement, and product architecture aspects…. For customers with integrated API and microservice environments, the vendor’s AppMesh and microservice runtime extend customers’ container and service mesh environments for greater combined management, monitoring, and governance.”

Overall, the solution is flexible enough to support a wide range of API strategies, especially for customers that are ready for the strong governance and discipline necessary to ensure strategic success of one’s API program,” concluded the Forrester report’s vendor profile of Software AG.