API Management for CxOs (Part 2): Responsibilities of CIO

In this part, we build upon the roles of the CxOs that we covered in part one of this blog post series. We now delve deeper into the responsibilities of the CxOs towards API management.

Critical responsibilities of CXOs for effective API management

Streamlining API management is a continuous process. It needs to deal with the day-to-day changes and dynamics of the API governance. C-level management has a critical role in driving this initiative. Their teams must be aware of the strategic direction. Together, they must work within the realms of the organizational policies to deploy and maintain API management software. Additionally,  they must also be observant to take notice of fraudulent practices in API adoption.

Based on the most critical C-level roles involved in API management, we can further elaborate on their specific responsibilities to effectively drive the API management initiative. Let’s take a look at the duties of the CIO organization.

Want to take a look at the responsibilities of the CTO organization? Then head over to the part three of this blog series.

API management responsibilities of the CIO’s organization

For CIO, APIs are like the superhighways that help the information traverse from one department to another. As much as it is required to eliminate the barriers of information exchange, it is equally important to restrict it to authorized personnel. Maintaining this balance is the biggest concern for the CIO.

From the API management perspective, here are the key responsibilities of the CIO organization.

1. Ownership of the API governance process: It is the CIO organization’s responsibility to ensure that all the APIs and their usage follows a strict constraint, both within and outside the enterprise. These constraints further expand into users, roles, and access control rules. All of these are bound together with a set of policies. These policies are defined by the CIO organization, within the ambit of the IT policies. However, the enforcement and monitoring of policies is the responsibility of the API governance team.   
2. Maintaining SOPs for API change management: As per the API lifecycle, many change events can happen during APIs’ life. Updating the policies for APIs also results in change requests. All the standard operating procedures (SOPs) about any change in APIs or the API governance processes are the responsibility of the CIO organization. Even in this case, the actual execution of the change request is carried out by the API governance team. However, the CIO organization must review and approve all the changes.
3. Review of API build and API consume steps: Setting up a new API, either for publishing or consumption, also must go through an approval process as per CIO’s behest. In some ways, these can also be treated as change events. Hence SOPs must be defied and routed through the CIOs organization.
4. Periodic auditing and compliance checks: This one is probably the most significant pain point for any CIO. The CIO organization is directly accountable for any events leading to leakage, breach, declassification, stealing, or unauthorized access to information. Therefore, it is vital to set up an independent team within the CIOs’ control, to monitor and conduct audit drills on all APIs to ensure they strictly adhere to the IT and security policies. Further, if the company is rated for specific data security standards, all published APIs must be explicitly audited for compliance. Declassification of sensitive information through APIs demands special attention. These include, but are not limited to, PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data, IP (Intellectual Property), or trade secrets.
5. API monitoring: For CIO organization, API monitoring covers a broad spectrum of activities such as:
   1. Access and Usage: Monitoring the user profiles accessing the APIs based on their team, department, or roles. 
   2. Information Security: Monitoring APIs for safeguarding the boundaries of Information traversal.
   3. Governance Policies: Monitoring the API management policy changes to ensure that they adhere to standard guidelines. This task may also extend to monitoring the activities of the API governance teams.
6. Approvals for third-party APIs: If third-party APIs are allowed as part of the API adoption strategy, then such APIs must go through the CIO team’s scrutiny. Inducting these API within the enterprise has all the risks associated with information security. Robust SOPs must be in place to review and approve all third party APIs.

How Rakuten RapidAPI helps the CIO

Rakuten RapidAPI Enterprise Hub is a one-stop solution that enables the CIO organizations of an enterprise to define and implement successful API management strategies. Whether they want to implement governance policies for discovering and connecting to internal APIs or subscribe to third-party APIs, the Enterprise Hub gives them total control over the API governance, access, and monitoring of the API lifecycle. It also leverages the Rakuten RapidAPI marketplace, the world’s largest API marketplace with over ten thousand APIs.

You can read more about the Enterprise Hub here. If your enterprise needs assistance in setting up an easy-to-use and powerful API management platform, send us an inquiry right now.