Daniel Kocot came by again to talk about the lines between our private and public APIs. We had been talking about internal, first-party, and third-party APIs back and forth on LinkedIn, and I recommended that he come by and we will have a conversation. Danield helped us realize that our separation between the layers was more about access, control, and the speed of business over just about being inside or outside the firewall and DMZ. Daniel sees this for what it is–it is about people. Lines of business, teams, tribes, and partners. Daniel has that very outside-in view of API operations, and codecentric AG is being brought inside to solve the big problems for their customers. Talking with Daniel makes me realize how important it is to have these conversations about our APIs and portals, because not everyone has a handle on the nuance of what is happening at the edge of our enterprises.
Honestly, it is really hard to have a sensible and coherent conversation with enterprise leadership from the inside-out about the security, privacy, and other concerns at the edge of the enterprise. This is why I value having conversation with people like Daniel who work to tackle these big problems from the outside-in. Enterprise leadership needs to understand the blind spots, damage, leaks, and the nuance of exposing HTTP APIs to partners via portals, but also via web, mobile, and AI applications. This lack of understanding of this layer is why so many enterprises are giving away the farms in the name of AI right now. As Daniel made clear for me, this isn’t a firewall or DMZ issue, this is a people issue and a having the hard conversations around how we are making our digital resources and capabilities available. As always, thank you to Daniel for coming by, I love hearing your stories from the front lines of API consulting, and the role that governance plays in all of this.
