API Management Overview

Leading Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter have achieved tremendous success by opening up their APIs to third-party developers. An increasing number of organizations are looking to emulate this success by publishing APIs that can be used to build applications for mobile devices and the Web.

For larger enterprises, exposing application data via APIs creates challenges around security, performance and manageability. Layer 7 has designed an enterprise-class API Management product suite designed to help Fortune 500 enterprises and service providers securely, efficiently and effectively leverage the power of Web APIs.

API Gateways

Layer 7’s SecureSpan Gateways are offered with built-in functionality for API publishing, security and management.

API Proxy
The API Proxy provides all the core security and metering functionality required for REST and JSON-based APIs, including OAuth support. It is available as a low-cost VMware virtual appliance or as hosted Cloud deployment.
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Quick Links:
API Security & OAuth Webinar Featuring Forrester Research, Inc. | API Virtualization Tutorial

Management

Layer 7 offers products designed to help organizations address two significant management challenges that arise when exposing APIs externally:

• The need to manage day-to-day operation of APIs, including performance, health, usage metrics and version tracking

• The need to help external developers discover API interfaces and documentation, register for access accounts and self-manage API usage

API Portal
The API Portal helps API publishers to onboard third-party developers and to manage how these developers use the exposed application data.
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Service Manager
The Enterprise Service Manager creates visibility into the functioning of API publishing projects, enabling centralized operations management.
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Federation

Layer 7 offers a flexible set of tools to help API publishers deploy identity federation configured to enterprise-level security standards.

OAuth Toolkit
The OAuth Toolkit empowers organizations to leverage OAuth, which is rapidly becoming the standard delegated authentication method for Web-based resources such as APIs. The OAuth Toolkit one of the most complete solutions for managing OAuth use cases for service providers and service consumers alike.
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Quick Links:
OAuth Toolkit Data Sheet