Azure API Management vs. Envoy Visitors

APIM is useful for the standard scenarios:

1) Securing your back-end APIs - If you have a legacy back-end web service that has a basic authentication scheme, you can add some additional security by placing APIM in front, and requiring subscription keys. Leverage your existing firewall to ensure only your APIM instance can communicate with your back-end API, and you've basically added a layer of protection.

2) Lift and shift - there are always going to be clients that don't want to update their clients to use a newer API; in some cases you can make a newer API look like an older one by implementing some complex policies in APIM. You can also do the opposite, making older APIs look new, such as making an XML back-end accept both JSON and XML.

3) Centralizing your APIs - if you've acquired another company and want to make their API set look as if it's a part of the larger whole, APIM is an easy way to provide a consistent front-end interface for developers.

Incentivized

Envoy Visitors would suit most office buildings and locations. It will easily cater to small, medium, and large enterprises. It is multi-faceted and very flexible to cope with any amount of people's data and is excellent for any companies wishing to capture the numbers of people entering and leaving their buildings. Its reporting capabilities are especially useful for operational and maintenance management.

Incentivized

• Easy commissioning of APIs.
• Great policies to control access.
• Easy mock services for testing.

Incentivized

• Easily track and manage who is in your office.
• Better security, as you know who is or was in your office.

Incentivized

• Lack of robustness is a bit of an issue. Several other providers offer more options and capabilities, but then, they are lacking in interface ease.
• As with anything Azure, pricing is really hard to stay on top of. I always find that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you get the bill. Having an excellent Azure Administrator can help resolve that.
• Integrating with app services outside of Azure can be a challenge, or at least much more challenging than just using Azure App Services.

Incentivized

• There aren't any features that are hard to use
• In my opinion, I wish I can have an "idiot button" for visitors to press when they say "This is too complicated..."
• I wouldn't mind if it were more personalized. Like to change a font color or background to match with a particular user.

Easy to Setup. Organizations benefit from a simple onboarding procedure. Feature richness. Provides guest pre-registration, badge printing, and security warnings. Customizability Options for customizing the experience include branding, processes, and compliance needs. Integrations. Compatible with other technologies such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and access control systems. I like it lot.

The system is very easy to use and intuitive so did not need to contact support on any occasion. Even when there was a major overhaul to the user interface, the reference and help docs assisted with finding features and functions. Overall due to the lack of needing to actually contact a support representative has given this application a high overall support score.

Incentivized

Azure APIM vs Amazon API Gateway:

1) Azure APIM was a complete package that included a developer portal.

2) We are very Microsoft centric - so the Microsoft product suite aligned very well with our business needs.

3) It was faster and easier to stand up Azure APIM for testing than it was for the Amazon API Gateway.

Incentivized

I would imagine that Envoy has a very user-friendly and streamlined process for the visitor registration office. After the pandemic, solutions like this weren’t really in place. Now that the hybrid workforce is something of the foreseeable future, we were able to onboard with Envoy very quickly and it has cemented itself as an application of usage within our stack.

Incentivized

• We can always think of positive ROI impact on business
• It helps to easily facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of our APIs

• Because we are a non-profit, every visitor has the potential of being a donor or volunteer. Before we had this system we didn't have an easy way to follow-up or even capture information.
• We create technology that helps the homeless communities, with that people have an expectation that we are up to date on technology. Envoy looks and feels like us.

Incentivized