HTTP APIs have evolved over the last quarter century to be the standard for how you make digital resources and capabilities available in web, mobile, device, and artificial intelligence applications. At the early part of the century HTTP APIs combined with API gateway and API management began providing some simple yet sophisticated ways of managing how data, content, media, and other resources are accessed that ODBC, file systems, and other approaches couldn’t provide. HTTP APIs provided a low-cost, yet robust approach to safely and securely providing access to backend systems, offering a much more professional front to the many different ways in which enterprises generate revenue and produce value as part of the markets in which they operate.
- Databases - API gateways provide a much more secure and observable way to access data within a database than your standard ODBC or JDBC connector, helping provide more awareness to how digital resources are being put to use in applications.
- File Systems - APIs allow you to translate files on disk into API responses, and translate API responses into files on disk in some backend system, while proving more visibility into how that data within files is being used than you will get from FTP by itself.
- Backend Systems - APIs are often used to media existing backend systems using a variety of infrastructure APIs, file systems, databases, and other approaches, translating all or part of an existing backend system into what is needed in external application.
- 3rd-Party APIs - APIs are also a great way to abstract away 3rd-party APIs with an interface that is standardized for how a company uses it, allowing for more awareness of how it is applied, but also potentially a way to swap out 3rd-party APIs along the way.
100% of access to enterprise digital resources should be via APIs. If someone is telling you that an API isn’t adequate they are trying to take advantage of you in some way. HTTP APIs can accommodate the majority of use cases, and then there are additional protocols and patterns that can be applied to meet special use cases. Having a unified API front for access all of your digital resources, whether they are used internally or externally provides a single access, control, observability, traceability, reporting, and security layer for all of the digital resources and capabilities you use to generate revenue and value. Any resource or capability not accessed via an API is a potential breach in security and blind spot when it comes to understanding how your business works, so make sure you are always doing business via an API to have the control you need.
