At TeejLab Research we are collecting meta-data from thousands of APIs to better understand their security and legal compliance challenges. Currently, we have more than 20,000 APIs developed by more than 15,000 different vendors belonging to 50 different categories. We have also investigated thousands of Open Source projects to understand the growth of various APIs. Whereas the growth of APIs was determined by evaluating which Open Source projects are using which APIs. Overall, our main research goal is to understand how APIs are growing within organizations so that we can build better API management solutions. Our research reveals that APIs are primarily growing due to the following reasons.
Open Source Software (OSS): Many OSS projects provide integrations with various other software systems, e.g., payments, logistics, maps, image/audio processing, etc. Thousands of OSS projects are being used in enterprise solutions while accelerating the usage of APIs.
Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A): When companies acquire other companies or merge with them, the newly acquired assets (software systems) bring APIs in bulk.
Business Functions: The growth of data driven innovations at organizations has accelerated the growth of APIs.
Third Party Integrations: Organizations need integrations with third-party solutions that increased the growth of APIs.
Overall, the number of APIs in a given organization could easily be in thousands. Because of these large numbers, enterprise API ecosystems can simultaneously be data-rich, diverse and complex. In this very dynamic environment, APIs pose serious compliance and security challenges, especially when organizations need to deal with thousands of APIs.
Do you want to know more about our cutting-edge API management solution that enables enterprises to realize the full potential of APIs without compromising on API security and legal compliance? Contact us for more details about our research.