Technology and Delivery are core tenants of any successful API initiative. This area is often the primary focus for those accountable to establishing and running an effective API Practice in their organization. The first place of focus is often API Management tooling and the first problems being solved are centered around bringing such a solution into the organization and operationally supporting it. What every organization realizes is that for an API Practice initiative to succeed, you must look beyond standing up gateways and portals, the comfortable satisfaction of a bulletproof three-9’s operational support plan, and a thoroughly justified head count request complete with RACI charts. These are all essential components, but they don’t guarantee success. A successful API Practice garners API adoption at scale. Vanick Digital has the experience to help you understand what obstacles will deter adoption, reduce speed, and prevent scale. Awareness and planning at this level up front is the difference between year-2 success and failure.
Great architecture is backed by well established principles – abstraction, autonomy, efficiency, resilience, etc. Today’s ‘digital’ paradigm is motivating aggressive new solution architectures that adhere to these same principles. Your API Program is one of the key digital channels that will leverage these innovative digital solutions. It follows that API Program Architecture is not only responsible for defining an API Management solution, but will influence many of these new patterns that support it such as microservices, eventing, streaming, and others.
Vanick Digital has established a core API Reference Architecture used by our expert API architects to guide the establishment of digital solution patterns that work across these areas in your organization.
Security is a highly prioritized concern in every organization that is focused on increasing API adoption. It is also a tenant of every architecture and delivery practice in Vanick Digital’s framework. Beyond its foundational presence, there are a few areas of security that require specific attention.
Secure infrastructure is critical at the API Management layer. This is the front door to your API Program. It’s important to understand solution and product architectures, infrastructure, and transactional patterns at play to know where and how to focus on risk.
API Authentication and Authorization should be consistent across your API Program, simple to understand, and easy to interact with. Vanick Digital security workshops are guided by practical application of well-established API industry standards, and answer questions around solution needs and available tools specific to your organization.
Security driven governance is an area that can quickly get out of hand, creating stage gates and other processes that cripple delivery speed and agility. It can be difficult to answer the question of what really needs to be governed and what doesn’t, resulting in “let’s cover everything” governance. By combining tools like our API Security Policies and Standards along with our API Categorization Framework, Vanick Digital helps you focus on pragmatic governance that provides the right oversight while minimizing impact to delivery.
To ensure continued API consumption, you must be able to meet constantly evolving API requirements and demand. Delivery capabilities that can meet this need are critical.
Vanick Digital’s framework considers a number of areas that will impact this capability. Some of these include:
- Organizational team structure
- API delivery process
- Testing paradigms
- API DevOps automation
We help break down complex organizational dependencies, define new roles (ex: API Product Manager), work through API-specific testing models, and utilize existing CI/CD tools to accomplish this goal.
