By Borya Shakhnovich
It's very common for an app to shift industry standards and
customer expectations overnight. As a result of this, agility has become a core
facet of maintaining business continuity. Implementing tools that allow
businesses to withstand the force of industry disruptors remain top of mind for
executive decision-makers. While not new, Application Programming Interfaces
(APIs) give companies the ability to be more agile, save some cash, and
consistently meet customer expectations without compromising security, compliance,
or business continuity. But what best
practices can businesses apply to APIs to make the most of their numerous
benefits?
To start, let's identify a few of the key value propositions
for API use:
- Integration: In a post-Facebook world, it seems every business has
adopted their old mantra of "move fast and break things." Industry standards
can change quickly, new trends emerge and redefine established byways all the
time. APIs give enterprises that may otherwise
lack the freedom to capitalize on new trends, the opportunity to apply and test
new functions quickly. APIs are easily integrated into existing architecture
(relative to building out an entirely new application), reducing time to market
and increasing company agility.
- Innovation: APIs give businesses the agility to innovate quickly,
making it easier for them to expand their reach and meet clients' needs across
platforms. When global school furniture manufacturer Resero Group needed
to pivot from paper to digital price quoting, they transitioned to the signNow
API to quickly replace their paper-based workflows. This expedited the
quotation process by automating customer communications, prepopulating forms
and guiding end-users through the completion process, and notifying account managers once they were completed.
Reducing the manual steps in the sales process improved both customer and
employee experience.
- Cost savings: Using third-party applications to handle critical
business functions saves money on front and back end development. APIs have a
relatively short turnaround time for deployment (some can take minutes or hours
to set up instead of days or weeks), which allows organizations to test
market-ready applications and determine the value-add to the business without
committing personnel and financial resources to build an internal tool from scratch. Additionally, APIs are
generally easier to maintain as a change to an API doesn't require a
reconfiguration of existing systems.
Bringing APIs into
the Business
When considering how to implement APIs, business
decision-makers should have a thorough understanding of their unique needs and
do extensive research to ensure compatibility. Questions like "do we have enough
internal expertise to build this ourselves?" and "how quickly do we want to
deploy to customers?" are excellent starting points to determine whether the
organization should buy or build a new feature. Organizations should treat API
integrations as they would any external partnerships and exercise the same
rigor of research when selecting an API to manage key aspects of their
business. There are numerous websites dedicated to providing objective software
reviews, and recommendations and testimonials can be sourced from within your
network.
In addition, companies should ensure that standard security
protocols are put in place to secure API data and reduce potential
vulnerabilities in the system stemming from the connection. Managing and
securing APIs should be a pillar of an overall security strategy. All data
should be encrypted and validated; this guarantees that malicious data isn't
being entered into the system and corrupting the validation process. Ensuring
backward compatibility is also a key consideration when choosing APIs. After an
update, users should still be able to use older versions of a product without
sacrificing data, functionality, or having to adjust on their end.
APIs are powerful tools that offer a myriad of benefits.
They allow businesses to consistently expand their offerings; meeting existing
and new client needs across platforms and quickly adjusting to disruption.
Enhancing legacy infrastructure with the features and connectivity of APIs has
a ripple effect through the organization and to the customer - maximizing
available data, making it easier for employees to do their best work, and
improving the end-user experience.
Having a clear understanding of how these benefits can differentiate and
strengthen an organization makes it easier to determine which API is best for
you.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Borya created the vision for airSlate's
easy-to-use, automated, end-to-end document workflow solution. He is passionate
about our products and ensuring that they meet the needs of our vibrant
community of users. He has 20-years experience developing and applying
algorithms and models to drive business results and academic insights. Prior to
joining airSlate, he founded Orwick, an online community for scientific
research. He also was a professor of BioInformatics at Boston University and a
fellow in Systems Biology at Harvard University. He has published many research
papers, including ones on the evolution of genetic structures, which he adapted
to create airSlate's exceptional growth model.
Borya received a BS in Computational BioPhysics from
University of Illinois, a PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University.