Author: Kevin McAbee

Categories
Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation Strategy: A Checklist For Businesses

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Green Irony in April 2022 and has been updated to reflect the latest data.

No matter the industry, if your business is using native integration capabilities from Salesforce or building a reusable API that manages data access through MuleSoft, you are at risk of missing the mark on key business objectives if you don’t focus on creating an agile digital transformation strategy.

To achieve successful digital transformation and meet customer expectations, you must be innovative—but not just for the sake of keeping up with new technologies. You need to marry business and technology to create an agile business model with processes that can be scaled for the future. But where should you begin?

Digital Transformation Pain Points

First, you need to assess your current roadblocks. Use the following checklist to evaluate if your business is experiencing any of these digital innovation pain points:

✅  You’ve purchased new technology platforms, but don’t know how to leverage them properly.

As technology platforms continue to boom, companies are purchasing an increasing amount of SaaS solutions for their business as they consolidate their digital processes. However, new ways of doing business often require new skills to be learned. Struggling to leverage these platforms properly can come at a high cost. 

✅  The time it takes to connect all of your data is painfully slow.

Most businesses are used to writing a few APIs or scripts themselves. However, one pain point your business may be facing is the inability to rapidly integrate and utilize all of your internal and external data sources across the entire organization. This friction can put you a step behind the competition and can be detrimental to your business goals. 

✅  Technical expertise and bandwidth are simply not available, especially on small teams.

Even if your company has connected data, it may lack the technical expertise or bandwidth to scale projects easily and efficiently with API-led technology like MuleSoft. Whether you need to implement reservation booking, chatbot features, or loyalty programs, it’s likely that your data won’t be accessible or accurate. 

✅  Digital transformation projects ramp up quickly, but ultimately crash and burn.

Many companies and business leaders looking to gain a competitive advantage in the digital world will start too many projects at the same time without a cohesive vision or strategy in place—leading to major initiatives failing. When businesses move at lightning speed without a plan, the probability of crashing and burning is imminent. Many businesses soon discover they have the technology in place, but don’t have a corresponding long-term strategy necessary to truly leverage their digital tools. This not only affects your bottom line but can also decrease employee engagement and satisfaction, leading to greater turnover.

If you’ve identified with one or more of these common business problems—or if you’re newly in a state of panic—take a breath and keep reading.

3 Tips to Create a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

Keeping up in today’s digital age is necessary, but not easy—and there is definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach. Here are a few of our top suggestions to help you effectively implement an agile business strategy:

1) Gain alignment on your business goals.

Defining your desired business outcomes requires getting the entire executive team on the same page when it comes to processes, including how to navigate your current technology roadblocks that keep you from moving forward.

Unfortunately, gaining alignment across your entire organization is easier said than done. Our recommendation is to use your company vision as the backstop for all decisions and strategies. A healthy vision can make it clear what the right choices are when deciding on future projects, scope, and priorities. From here, determine how to fulfill that vision by accomplishing your set business goals.

2) Understand your data and integration needs for leveraging new technologies.

In order to realize your company’s goals, you need access to data and an understanding of the process. This means you need to connect to various systems, orchestrate calls between them, and combine them through business processes. The resulting data then needs to flow to the people and systems that need it, using data models that make sense across the organization.

However, building out a digital model of your organization that spans all of your internal and external systems is a daunting task. Though businesses are seeing an immediate need for the data and business logic to realize business outcomes, they lack an overall strategy and roadmap to execute against.

3) Create a digital transformation strategy.

You know which goal completions will lead to cost savings and revenue generation. You know you need system and data integrations to achieve those business goals. But where do you start? How do you move from your current operating model into total business transformation?

You need a digital transformation strategy that aligns your IT organization with the business organization. You need an agile approach that enables the creation of reusable assets that lay the foundation atop which you build your integration application network. You need to showcase ROI by measuring the success of new business processes through metrics and KPIs.

Blending Strategy and Execution with a Digital Transformation Consultancy Partner

Enter: Green Irony. We are the partner that specializes in blending strategy with execution to assist in your company’s digital transformation journey. We marry business outcomes with system integrations on MuleSoft by developing and executing integration roadmaps with defined and measurable ROI. We are constantly finding new ways forward in today’s digital world.

Bring your company into the 21st century—build your digital transformation strategy with Green Irony today.

Categories
API Security

API Security Best Practices: Top Defenses to Avoid Critical Security Threats

API Security Best Practices

Most businesses have been hearing it for some time now: APIs are the future, APIs are the way to go, APIs or bust. The main purpose of leveraging APIs is to allow other technology systems within your business and third-party vendors to access your data and generate business logic that is utilized for generating revenue, serving customers, and much more.

What many businesses don’t know though is that API security is an essential and mandatory part of securing critical information, whether that’s financials, personal employee data, client data, and customer data. This is important because whether you are opening, sharing, changing, or pulling sensitive data, you are leaving your business wide open to security breaches.

So whenever you have all of your APIs open and available, there are immediate measures you must take to limit unwanted access to your data. Here are the top three basic API security measures you must take for threat defense.

Top 3 API Security Basics for Threat Defense

1. Two-way Encrypted Communication

To prevent any “man-in-the-middle” attacks, communications must be two-way encrypted. It’s easy for people to see data moving back and forth or hack into routers, even if only one way is encrypted. The key is to make sure that whenever you are talking, even before passing credentials, you’re doing so through protected communication. It means having SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security) and utilizing HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure). 

2. Authentication and Authorization

Once your communication is encrypted, you now have a safe way to take and share sensitive data, such as usernames, passwords, client IDs, and secret tokens. Authentication is only the first step. This is where you have your proper credentials and a password that is more complicated than “password.” Authentication is great, but just as key is authorization, which many businesses fail to check. 

Many companies know which individuals should have access to certain data, but are their APIs checking for the same? Is the data read-only? Can changes be made? Can data be shared? Are the right people the only ones who can do all of the above? The last thing a company needs is to have open access for every employee or third-party,  no matter what level they are at. In order to prevent this, there must be proper authorization.

3. Denial-of-Service Attack Prevention

Denial-of-service attacks is when someone can take and send enough requests at you in a short amount of time. Your system will not be able to process it and is going to timeout and crash. This is when you start getting into rate-limiting and throttling policies. Both are critical in ensuring that your APIs can only process so many requests per minute. You always need to set some kind of rate limit because that’ll prevent people from just hammering down requests and forcing a security leak.

However, the above are table stakes and only the beginning. Businesses really should be reviewing the OWASP Top 10 (https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/) security concerns and making sure their application networks are protected against attacks of all kinds. This includes data injection, using out-of-date components, missing server updates – the list goes on. Once you have that protection in place, the next step is to have a plan in place for ongoing monitoring. 

API Security Monitoring Best Practices

First is taking stock of what APIs and applications you have. Companies don’t realize that they might have a number of APIs running that nobody intended to run in the first place. Many businesses have servers with exposed APIs, third-party SaaS systems with the same, or even legacy APIs that most forgot existed. 

Best way to combat that? Find and test them. Listen to network traffic and sniff out offending systems or APIs. Even if you know an API and its specification (the communication contract), you should generate different permutations to see if there is a way to break it and get access to data you shouldn’t have. 

In essence, you want to have some type of system that can do ongoing monitoring that generates alerts and reports the speed back to you to say if everything is on lock-down and secured. Many businesses will throw their hands up at this saying they don’t have time, but API security and ongoing security monitoring are mandatory – not optional. 

If your team doesn’t have the expertise or bandwidth to ensure all of the above API security elements and have the capacity to do ongoing monitoring, our partner Noname Security specializes in this. Noname API Security Platform is the only solution to proactively secure your environment from API security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and design flaws while providing API attack protection with automated detection and response.

If you aren’t actively pursuing security measures, it’s only a matter of time until someone finds your company and you have a data breach. Simply put, don’t be that company.

To take the initial steps to secure your business, see our API Security Assessment & Remediation Plan offering. In just a few short weeks we’ll help identify your API security risk and provide a remediation plan to address the greatest risks to your business and technology roadmap.

Categories
Digital Transformation Platform Migration & Modernization

Balancing the Scales of API Networks with MuleSoft and CloudHub

Balanced the Scales

In a previous blog post, Aaron Shook broke down how MuleSoft as the platform for your API network can be the key to modernizing the legacy systems driving critical areas of your business. In this post, I want to take that explanation a step further and break down how MuleSoft can be a fulcrum in the balance between your business’s needs and the methods and speed of technology to address those needs.

The Current State of Enterprise Application Networks

There’s always a balancing act that must be maintained when developing enterprise application networks. Often, the balance is focused on size, though not of any one monolithic application or complex microservice. Instead, it’s the size of the business application network.

More and more businesses are relying on building new applications that communicate with older, existing applications developed over the years internally, and from third-party sources. New microservices and APIs are built to bring all of this information together to fulfill an internal business need or build out a more robust offering for their clients. Even more APIs and data flow systems are then required for financial reporting and trends analysis.

The Problems as API Networks Evolve

At some point, an architect or CTO comes to the realization that the evolution of business needs over time has resulted in a number of disparate mainframe systems, web applications, financial systems, CRMs, and so on and so forth. The ability to manage user access, security, and overall maintenance and operations begins to accrue not only technical debt but administrative and project management debt. Even attempting to discuss and agree on a single API design often leads to scattered internal wiki pages, email chains, and often multiple conflicting API design documents.

Now everything slows down – development, the ability to orchestrate multiple layers of APIs, or just trying to find a single source of truth for the company’s API offerings. Progress begins to grind to a halt. As an architect or CTO, one must find a balance that allows for autonomous changes, updates, and new offerings to be made, all the while coordinating the overall flow, access, operation, and maintenance of this living, breathing system.

MuleSoft and their CloudHub iPaaS offering provide that balance, as I’ll detail below.

API Design With MuleSoft

Having a centralized source of truth for an API spec that reflects previous, current, and future versions of an API, and that can be shared amongst departments and units is very important in an enterprise setting.

MuleSoft’s Design View and Exchange allow architects and API designers to develop API specs that are automatically backed by mock implementations and include basic validation declarations of fields and more. These specs can be shared and viewed by those within the company, acting as both documentation and testing platforms before the implementation is ever touched.

On top of that, the implementations can be automatically “discovered” or associated with a particular specification, allowing for multiple concurrent versions to be running, and historical implementations to be viewable by the internal team and others.

As more APIs are added, individual data types can be aggregated into common API data type libraries and shared across APIs. This improves both consistencies of data and models across APIs but also standardizes the languages used by architects, developers, and product managers across the enterprise.

API design provides the foundation from which implementation, changes, and discussions spring. This ethos is ever-present in MuleSoft’s infrastructure and has saved Green Irony a vast amount of time in working with clients and keeping all of product and software development on the same page.

Application Network Security Within MuleSoft’s CloudHub

Security policies, SLA tiers, and access management can all be handled within MuleSoft’s CloudHub platform. It comes built with hooks and supporting modules for Oauth, SAML, basic authentication, client id/secret access, and more. The interesting thing is that policies themselves are associated with a combination of a particular API and consumer – not with the API’s implementation or code. This is important since it allows you to associate a particular policy with many different APIs and manage access across your API network without having to be concerned with how a particular API itself is implemented.

API consumers can request access to a particular API that abides by their associated credentials and CloudHub itself will handle disseminating the request to admins, who themselves have an interface for approving or rejecting individual requests.

On the other side of things, HTTP requests allow for the inclusion of TLS trust and keystores, so there’s no need to sacrifice on the security of outgoing communications.

Banks, insurance companies, and various other financial institutions are using MuleSoft as a bedrock foundation for their application networks. One of the main reasons for that use is MuleSoft’s focus on security. The ease with which we can implement and configure TLS and other security protocols further solidify their focus on protecting data and network traffic.

Developing APIs With MuleSoft’s Anypoint Studio

Since the API design and implementation are entirely separate, the roles of architects, API managers, and implementation developers are kept separate. This separation allows architects to work with product development teams to create, update, and improve the design of an API without impacting developers. Once an API has been designed, developers can import the new or updated API spec into Anypoint Studio and begin working on implementation and changes.

Unlike most frameworks and platforms, MuleSoft’s Anypoint Studio will automatically generate the basic plumbing and connectors for an API based on the spec itself. When an API design is published to Exchange, that connector can then be imported and used by any other API with access.

This aforementioned handling of plumbing gives developers input validation, automatically generates MUnit tests for each endpoint, and provides other assorted freebies.

The ease with which development teams can pull API designs into new projects and update existing projects with changes to the API design cannot be overstated. Additionally, these changes to the API are reflected in the automatically generated connectors by API version, which greatly simplifies updating other APIs and interfacing with them.

There’s also a significant depth to errors, allowing for the continuation of processing if an error is reached, or allowing it to bubble up to the response. All of these errors are wrapped by intuitive namespace/identifier combos that let a developer easily categorize and reclassify errors.

These features all come together to provide developers with more time to focus on the implementation itself. Once development is complete, the API implementation can be deployed to CloudHub where it will be automatically associated with the API specification.

Of course, no API is perfect or complete out of the gate. The spec will change over time. When an API designer updates the specification, developers can import the changes into their Anypoint Studio project, where top-level endpoint updates will be handled automatically.

DevOps for Application Networks With MuleSoft

After development has been completed, it must be deployed, monitored, and maintained. MuleSoft’s CloudHub offering provides for common DevOps needs, from CI/CD, application network monitoring, to VPC management, and more.

Many development teams attempt to wrangle their various technology stacks into some semblance of a CI/CD flow. Understanding this need, MuleSoft has a variety of APIs that can be used to handle deployment, monitoring, and various others needs. Whether it’s Jenkins, Azure, or any other automation setup, the combination of MuleSoft’s maven plugin and REST APIs lets you run and publish test results, as well as deploy full applications, their updates, and associated SLA policies, and more.

Provisioning VPCs, region management, clusters, high availability settings, load balancing – all are actually really easy to do with the Runtime Manager admin interface. It’s also easy to integrate your SLA policy infrastructure and manage those in the API Manager section of CloudHub, and how those APIs are tied to the actual worker applications in Runtime Manager. Runtime Manager admins can also build their dashboards to track their applications, or if already using Splunk, configure their CloudHub workers to interact with and send log data to Splunk.

As applications are running, there will be inevitable issues that need to be tracked down across an application network. Usually, these are associated with individual requests that are failing. MuleSoft comes with a built-in feature called “correlation ID”, that will let external clients communicate with MuleSoft, and especially requests between MuleSoft APIs, to log errors and anything else and have them associated with that particular ID.

As with API design, security, and development, the suite of features presented to DevOps personnel simplifies the provisioning, management, and maintenance of APIs.

Conclusion

There is no single feature in the MuleSoft family that causes it to dominate the API industry. Instead, it’s the culmination of all the helpful features and abilities across every aspect of API network design, development, and implementation.

MuleSoft and CloudHub give enterprise companies a holistic view and insight into all of their APIs on the application network. Everything from having built-in API documentation and source of truth, to full-feature operations support – these are all extremely helpful and useful for businesses trying to get a hold of all of their APIs. Sure, keep the APIs on other systems, but have MuleSoft provide its own tiny API microservice interface to them, and bring them into the fold of everything else in your business.

Everything in IT is a balance. MuleSoft attempts to be a fulcrum in the balance between a business’s needs and the methods and speed of technology to implement them. It goes out of its way to provide a suite of features, all customizable, to remove the boilerplate and solved problems in building and maintaining application networks. This allows developers, business analysts, and operational teams the freedom and time to focus on the actual business problem and not on recreating the wheel around API design, implementation, and management.