Today, APIs have become an omnipresent technology universally used in various information systems. APIs serve as an interconnection layer, enabling fast communication between networks, applications, devices and other components. Businesses across industries rely on this technology to power operations of their web systems and apps.
And as the digital transformation keeps unfolding, the importance of APIs keeps growing, making this technology more and more critical to companies of all sizes. So it’s no wonder IT managers and business leaders are increasingly looking at API integration as a pathway to digital innovations for everything from a geo ip api to weather data apis.
So why is integrating APIs getting so widespread and how businesses today are taking the advantage of this tech innovation?
What does API integration mean to the business?
API integration is the most affordable and easy way for organizations to leverage all the latest technology innovations in their operations. API connectivity makes it easier for applications to communicate and share data with each other, allowing companies to create powerful business tools and save time by automating routine processes.
Here are a few (out of many) examples of how an organization can leverage the power of API integration to its benefit.
- Fast data movement with fewer errors.
APIs allow organizations to establish automated data movement processes in and between both internal and external systems. Which gives them the ability to transfer huge volumes of data fast and with reduced errors.
- Easy verification and data security.
When a company needs to make sure its data movements are secure, it can use APIs as a way to limit the access to information only to its partners or customers.
- Affordable scalability.
API integration makes scalability simple and affordable for any business, allowing it to grow without huge investments in expanding the IT infrastructure needed to support growing operations.
- Accessible automation.
API integration is essential for successful automation of various business processes, allowing companies to significantly increase productivity, cost-efficiency, and reduce errors.
- Streamlined business monitoring and analysis.
Centralized visibility across all business systems and processes is another advantage of API integration. APIs allow companies to streamline data collection and establish real-time analysis, providing management with timely reports containing valuable business insights.
When a business needs API integration?
As you can see, API integration can be beneficial to an organization in so many ways. In fact, the API ecosystem is more diverse than you have probably imagined. According to estimations, there are more than 24,000 different APIs in the world today. And another 3-4 thousand new APIs for a variety of purposes are being added every year.
So you can imagine the scope of possible applications for API integration by an organization. Let’s go through a few specific business needs where APIs are commonly applied today.
- You need to interconnect internal enterprise systems.
API integration is considered the best way to connect internal systems used by various teams and departments with each other. APIs allow enterprises to tie all their apps and tools together to enable quick and easy sharing of data between them for better efficiency of all business processes.
- You need to put business data to work.
It is not untypical for businesses to collect all kinds of data which later they end up unable to use or only capable of utilizing it in a very limited way. It is especially true when it comes to analysing legacy data, as it is more difficult to process big amounts of accumulated historical information. Today organizations can solve this problem with integration of APIs that help to easily extract information from databases and create automated workflows for routine business analysis.
- You need to build multifunctional apps with limited resources.
Creating new enterprise and consumer apps is a big part of digital transformation. And API integration is the tool that allows businesses to build and easily maintain even very comprehensive apps quickly and with limited resources, by simply connecting advanced components and technologies via API.
As an example, apilayer, a suite of productivity-boosting web APIs for developers and companies, offers a handful of APIs for easy web audience management and user verification. Such as Languagelayer, a user language detection API able to detect 173 world’s languages, or Mailboxlayer, an email address validation and verification API.
- You need to integrate IoT solutions and robotic devices into enterprise systems.
All kinds of mobile devices, IoT solutions and robots are another part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Most of them can be integrated into existing enterprise IT systems via APIs integration.
- You need to improve the productivity of your IT department.
It is quite typical for IT departments to be overburdened with tasks and requests, especially when it comes to companies rushing with digital transformation projects. APIs integration is an effective way to increase productivity of your development team and reduce the need to hire multiple experienced software engineers by utilizing third-party tools instead of building your own technology stack.
- You need reliable access to third-party data.
Finally, modern-day apps and services, both enterprise and consumer, often require access to accurate real-time data of various kinds, from currency exchange rates and weather forecasts to world news and stock market reports.
You can find all that in apilayer’s set of high-quality real-time data APIs. Select and integrate APIs from the apilayer suite to boost the efficiency of your solutions and/or ease the burden on your backend.
Head over and check out all of the APIs available from apilayer today.