SaaS, the cloud, big data, IoT and social media are creating massive disruptions within the market. These disruptions push businesses to move forward faster than ever before, but without an increase for IT in resources or an increased capacity to deliver new projects, it can become easy to blame IT for holding a business back rather than pushing it forward. Here are three ways to boost business agility without taking shortcuts that simply solve short-term issues.
Defeat Shadow IT
In his blog, MuleSoft™ expert Kevin Paige says, "Viewing IT as a blocker rather than a business partner, the broader business too frequently decides to take matters into its own hands. Departments like marketing, sales and finance start producing and procuring their own solutions outside of the central IT department, creating the rise of shadow IT."
Cloud-based mobile solutions further this problem by increasing the surface area of an organization. "Each new application requires and enables access to organizational data and assets. Unless the security team is directly involved in an application’s creation, acquisition and delivery – anyone can gain access or expose it without the IT team’s knowledge," Paige said.
How do companies solve this? According to Paige, through strategic integration discipline, such as API-led connectivity, the impulses that create shadow IT can be contained and turned into business assets..
Enforce Security Through API-Led Connectivity
Having one person or a single team in charge of creating security for a whole business simply won't work on a time-management level. With an API-led connectivity approach, this issue can be solved.
Rather than connecting things point-to-point, every asset now becomes a managed API, making it discoverable through self-service without losing security and control. Each of these API nodes, designed and built by the teams that need them, will have security best practices built in at the point of design – creating the concept of 'security by design.' These nodes are connected through APIs, which are standardized, well-defined entry points that are easy to visualize and thus secure."
-Kevin Paige
As services become connected, the system can discover and reuse them.
In his blog Page states, "In this approach, security isn’t imposed top-down like a service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiative. Instead, every group that is developing a service is doing it in a standardized, well-defined way that allows security to actually happen."
Using API nodes within the network encourages others to contribute to the network and securely expose critical assets while enabiling full visiblity into what information is accessed, used, and shared.
A Security By Design Approach
API-led connectivity creates an application network that is structurally more secure. "With an application network, security teams have many options for controlling who has access to particular systems, what information they have access to and what authentication is required to get in, among a number of other options. With an application network, these doors are built into an organization’s integration fabric, making it more secure," Paige said.
This becomes more and more important as businesses join new value chains by unbundling their core services and turning them into higher forms of business value to be used by third parties, according to Paige.
In his blog, Paige states, "Successful companies today not only need to embrace change, but they need to do it quickly. As business demands continue to grow at an accelerated pace, CIOs must increase the clock speed of their organization and, with fixed resources, figure out how to make IT scale to match."
