IBM API Connect is a scalable API solution that helps organizations implement a robust API strategy by creating, exposing, managing and monetizing an entire API ecosystem across multiple clouds. As businesses embrace their digital transformation journey, APIs become critical to unlock the value of business data and assets. With increasing adoption of APIs, consistency and governance are needed across the enterprise. API Connect aims to help businesses…
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IBM DataPower Gateway
Score 8.1 out of 10
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The IBM DataPower Gateway is a security and integration platform.
The power of IBM APIC is much more in contrast to Apigee or any other product of the same domain because it is having DataPower as the backbone which allows for easy integrating with almost any platform, providing the highest level of security, handling millions of transactions …
I love the IBM API Connect features, performance, and security level for all our business data. The workload balancing and integration with other third-party products are very simple. The data migration speed is beneficial, especially for time management, and creating process reports through IBM API Connect is incredible.
WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
The first thing challenge we faced with the product was that if you deploying it to a third party cloud, that was very challenging and we need IBM team help at every step of the way and as well all know IBM support doesn't come cheap. A reason for that is that there isn't enough documentation done on the subject from IBM side.
The upgrade process is not that seamless and involves a lot of hassles.
You really need to have our requirements sorted out clearly because it is not very easy to customize the UI according to your needs, So you need to involve IBM from the start and give them clear requirements and then work with them to achieve it.
The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.
IBM API Connect may be less appropriate for small-scale projects with minimal API management requirements, where simpler and more cost-effective solutions suffice. Organizations lacking the necessary technical expertise or resources to harness its full potential may face implementation challenges. In static environments with infrequent API changes or limited developer engagement, the platform's comprehensive features may be excessive for the task at hand.
There are two main reasons for choosing IBM over others. 1) Pricing 2) The conversation during the sales stage. The team at IBM understood our requirements and acted as consultants instead of sales people. They genuinely focused on providing a solution to our pain points which reflected during the implementation and continued after go-live in the form of technical support
I consider IBM API Connect as a business capability enabler - the ROI level is practically secondary.
With this platform at the core, associated architectural framework and guardrails ensure that we can progress with distributed development and automation in autonomous teams - a key factor to deliver required time to market performance.
At this time, security and trust is key. A flexible yet secure API manager layer is necessary to ensure our relationships with partners and customers.
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
