What Is Apigee and Why Do You Need It? Learn how you can Manage your APIs Better without all the complexity

Since the pandemic, businesses of all sizes around the globe have been quickly shifting their business models to digital. But what does it mean to go digital? The digital transformation imperative is the evolution businesses go through to enhance their operations at scale. It’s more than just launching online services, building an app, or migrating databases and workloads to the cloud. Digital transformation focuses on enterprises’ learning to embrace a fundamental change in how they conduct business. Instead of enhancing resource-limited strategies, digital transformation focuses on creating and embracing replicable digital processes and assets to harness new opportunities for growth at scale.

The Key to Unlocking Growth at Scale

For example, bakeries struggling to manage their kitchen, employ staff, take orders, make deliveries, and operate their website and mobile app can now simply post their menu to meal-delivery applications. Bakeries can then give delivery partners the responsibility manage orders and offload a bulk of their workload. The benefit for them? They can focus on creating delicious baked goods and attracting new customers. The key to creating a seamless experience is connectivity between your back-end operations, CRM, different databases (whether on-premise, on the cloud, or hybrid), your applications, digital services, partners, and everything in-between. Due to the pandemic, digital transformation journeys have been forced to accelerate. Transformations that were expected to take a year to complete are now being squeezed into months. To those new to digital, it seems a bit far-fetched, but how are businesses making it happen?

The Building Blocks of Digital Transformation

Well, the short answer is APIs. APIs play a major role in providing enterprises with the ability to securely collaborate and partner with internal and external ecosystem players. APIs are the fundamental building blocks for digital business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) interactions. They are the rules, protocols, and tools that software applications use to interact with each other. APIs are designed to provide secure sharing of business data to allow businesses to collaborate and create new services and features geared towards bettering the experience across channels.

Businesses that provide their services through a website or mobile app are most likely using APIs. APIs are not new, but the way we develop, manage, and publish APIs is evolving. Google Cloud’s Apigee is the world's leading enterprise API management platform geared towards helping enterprises develop and manage their back-end service APIs through a proxy layer. By fronting services with a proxy layer, Apigee provides your APIs with security, monitoring capabilities, analytics, and more. Since the start of the pandemic and recent growth spurt in digital transformation initiatives, Google Cloud has been working with enterprises through its partners like Abacus to deploy, track, monitor, and manage APIs. Google Cloud’s in-depth analysis and approach have earned them the recognition for Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management five times in a row. API management gateways help design, manage, secure, monetize, monitor and grow successful API programs. APIs need to be secured from unauthorized access and threat. API management gateways like Apigee allow you to handle existing services and complete APIs lifecycle in an easy-to-use format that your developers know how to manage and optimize, from publishing to consumption to governance and analysis.

Why Do You Need Apigee?

Today people can order a taxi, book a hotel, find a local restaurant, and pay for their food through apps on their mobile phones. Consumers expect every service, store, restaurant, and any digital experience for that matter, to be connected. This competitive environment stems from enterprises being able to streamline their business functions, operations, and public, private, or hybrid environments. But, what’s the secret to such synergy?

Managing APIs is the key to securely connecting all your systems and services with your employees, partners, and customers to deliver a frictionless digital experience. Apigee is one tool that can manage the complete APIs lifecycle and make it easier for enterprises to produce and deploy modern, developer-friendly apps that your customers would love. Developers creating modern apps and services, enterprises updating legacy applications, and others facilitating data transfer between applications and services can benefit from Apigee.

Modernize Your Existing Landscape with Microservices and APIs

If you build apps and services, two things are certain:

1. You’re exposing APIs in some form

2. Your apps are made by multiple business functions working together

Apigee accelerates your modernization journey by allowing new cloud services to consume your legacy data and applications. As a result, organizations can launch new mobile, web, and voice experiences for customers using their legacy data.

The API layer is a proxy between your legacy services and front-end systems and keeps the front-end systems up and running by routing requests as the legacy services are migrated or transformed into modern architectures.

How is a Service Mesh Relevant?

The increased usage of microservices architecture in an enterprise gradually increases the technical complexities, developing a strong need for deeper visibility and security control into its applications. This is when the organization can benefit most from a service mesh. A service mesh is a flexible architecture that enhances communications across apps and services. A common question is whether an enterprise requires both service mesh and API management gateway together.

The truth is yes! Each focuses on different aspects of the technology landscape and is complementary to each other. The service mesh modernizes your application networking stack and helps enterprises to build and manage microservices with standardized security protocols and policies. It also equips development teams with better monitoring and analytical capabilities. The API management layer primarily manages the complete API lifecycle.

Deliver Connected Digital Experiences

Today, enterprises are evolving drastically. Delivering a seamless digital experience to customers, partners, and developers has become challenging, especially in today’s technology landscape, which includes several public, private, hybrid and SaaS systems. Apigee serves as a glue to integrate multiple technology environments to function as one. By securely exposing digital assets to internal and external ecosystems, Apigee helps unlock new revenue streams and deliver connected digital experiences across touchpoints.

Deliver Open Banking with Apigee

The Apigee open banking APIx solutions simplify and accelerate compliance. Not worrying about compliance takes away a bulk of work and allows organizations to focus on their growth of ecosystems and partners through features such as the developer portal.

API Management for Healthcare

Data sharing in the healthcare industry is complex due to the strong health and privacy regulations but is also a need. APIx solutions simplify compliance with the FHIR allowing healthcare organizations to build new API-based digital services.

Three Pillars That Help with API Management

Developer Portal

An easy-to-use developer portal allows external and internal developers to discover your APIs and make it easier for them to use APIs to build new applications and services. The built-in AI-based analytics help you assess your APIs analytics, including traffic, APIs consumption, and monetization of every API and registered developer.

Monitoring & Analytics

Helps you monitor your APIs analytics to understand which APIs are used most and how.

API Runtime

Makes changes and build APIs without disrupting users and your back-end services.

Succeed in the API economy

Many businesses continue to focus on their digital transformation journeys even through the chaos caused by the pandemic. A well-designed API strategy with the right partner and a platform is the cornerstone of digital economy success. Whether you are starting on a small project, aiming for a more extensive deployment, or already have a digital platform, we have the expertise to help you implement Apigee by Google Cloud for a strong foundation in your digital future.