Why America’s Leading Mortgage Technology Provider Runs its Business on Apigee
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Black Knight is a leading provider of technology, data, and analytics to the mortgage industry, catering to both large and mid-tier banks in the United States. Over the past few decades, we tended to manage customer integrations on a case-by-case basis. Whenever a bank needed to connect with a Black Knight app, we’d launch another integration project. Lather, rinse, repeat. Needless to say, this was inefficient; we knew we had to do something to centralize this process.
Building versus buying an API management platform
To start, we created some homegrown API solutions. Despite being largely successful with one of these solutions, we saw that technology advances were outpacing our capacity to update our solutions in-house. We knew we needed to move toward an API platform that would support RESTful architecture and that would fully enable mobile solutions. It also had to be extremely secure. Knowing how complicated such a platform would be to build ourselves, we decided that our developers were better off focusing on providing core solutions to Black Knight clients; engaging with an outside provider was the right way for us to advance our API strategy.
After a lengthy proof-of-concept process, we went into production with the Apigee API Management Platform from Google Cloud in 2018. In our opinion, Apigee was the most complete, robust, technically sound and full-featured option from among all of the API management tools we evaluated. Its ease of use was the deciding factor for our developers, and the Apigee analytics capabilities provided considerable insight into the anatomy of an API call—something the other platforms we considered didn’t do as well.
Choosing Apigee meant that we didn’t have to focus on developing and maintaining a tool or spend enormous amounts of money trying to keep up with security patching. For a large company like Black Knight, an API management tool is something we don’t want to spend a lot of time on. We know that Google Cloud devotes tremendous resources to it, and it would be difficult to replicate that in-house.
Black Knight has more than 150 client-facing applications. Almost half of them now are built with APIs that are externally facing, and many of these apps use APIs that integrated with other Black Knight applications. Add to that the huge number of applications out there that come from clients and third-party vendors, and suddenly, we had a management challenge from an API perspective.
Driving cultural change
We came to Apigee with the goal of containing and empowering our huge ecosystem of APIs, customers, third parties, and internal users.
Given Black Knight’s size, our developers and customers understandably each have different business goals, so getting everyone to come to a centralized platform is a great opportunity. My role is to help people consider other options so they can be open to the benefits that Apigee brings us.
Now that we’ve engaged with Apigee for over a year, we see two big benefits. First, the huge reduction in point-to-point integrations has produced tremendous efficiencies for us and our customers, who now get instant integration once they’ve been authorized for a particular API. Second, Apigee’s capacity for mobile enablement lets us satisfy our customers’ needs for secure mobile apps.
Simplifying security
From a technical perspective, security is complicated for mobile apps. We’re often accessing sensitive information on a mobile device that can’t always be trusted. This kind of scenario requires us to implement a number of security precautions to help ensure confidential information remains protected.
The Apigee API management platform addresses these needs in the simplest way possible. It solves complex problems related to security without having to deploy a new API proxy each time we need to support a particular mobile device upgrade. Our back-end applications remain protected because Apigee helps manage security, requests, access tokens, and authorizations. Today, our back-end applications work with Apigee to communicate with mobile devices or servers coming over the internet.
Apigee has also enabled us to do a better job sharing a variety of APIs. The developer portal lets us stitch together APIs and get more creative about how we can innovate and build new solutions based on these collections of APIs. At this point, anybody that has a nondisclosure agreement with us can register for the developer portal. The nature of our business is such that we can’t just open up our APIs to anybody, but it’s available to our contracted third parties.
Our Apigee journey has been exciting, and we’re making great progress. I’m looking forward to what innovations we will come up with next, thanks to the way Apigee enables us to create, implement, and deliver.
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Application Development with Kpt
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Assuring Compliance in the Cloud: Paper by Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO
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Cloud transformation and the adoption of modern DevOps technology presents both opportunities and challenges for IT compliance functions. With DevOps style application development, the feedback loop for developers and engineers is much tighter than with traditional application development pipelines, enabling speed and agility of application release cycles. While speedy CI/CD is a critical advantage of DevOps, it also shifts compliance left in the development timeline, and therefore puts pressure on the IT risk & compliance organization to modernize their approach to regulatory compliance as well. With the ongoing shift towards cloud technologies and DevOps, modernization of regulatory compliance is no longer optional for an IT compliance function
Compliance modernization is a broad mandate that spans the way the function is governed; the tools, technology, and analytics it uses; the number and nature of its connections to other parts of the business; verifiability and auditability of the controls’ evidence, the expectations assigned to it; and more.
Public cloud technology is becoming a core part of many industries today, and with this comes some potential risks such as cloud misconfigurations exposing intellectual property, loss of physical control of assets, skillset scarcity around cloud based security and compliance.
Given the constantly changing risk landscape, it is critical that regulations more closely align to address these risks. As regulations and risks evolve, the aim of a modern compliance function is to help an organization stay compliant as it goes through a digital transformation. As organizations go through digital transformation, IT compliance also needs to transform — via upgrading the technology stack, modifying the business processes and most importantly re-skilling people to become cloud aware.
Today we are releasing the new paper by Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO. In the paper we reveal a new approach for modernizing your compliance approach using modern approaches and Google Cloud toolsets. Your team can leverage the paper to add value to enterprises, both by charting a course to the safe use of cloud technology and by reducing risk through the use of the public cloud.
Read the paper “Assuring Compliance in the Cloud.”
Also, review these related resources:
- “Risk Governance of Digital Transformation in the Cloud“ paper
- “Making Compliance Cloud-native” (episode 14) with Zeal Somani
- Google Cloud Compliance resource center
- Our compliance blueprints: PCI DSS on GKE and GCP FedRAMP Blueprint
- Google Cloud security best practices center
Private Services Connect in Google Cloud Regions Enables Customers to Consume Services Faster
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At Google Cloud, we believe in making it simple and secure to consume services whether they’re from Google, a third party or customer-owned. With Private Service Connect, we have adopted a service-centric approach to our network that abstracts the underlying networking infrastructure. And today, we are announcing Private Service Connect is generally available in all Google Cloud regions.
Private Service Connect allows you to create private and secure connections from your cloud networks to services like Cloud Storage or Cloud Bigtable and third-party services like Elastic, MongoDB or Snowflake. It creates service endpoints in your VPCs that provide private connectivity and policy enforcement, allowing you to easily connect to services across different networks and organizations.
Customers told us they want to consume services faster while making sure that the connectivity is private and secure. In the past, achieving this was a challenge: networking teams had to negotiate IP address blocks, mutually agree on policies and coordinate as applications evolved to newer versions. With Private Service Connect, you can delegate the consumption and delivery of services to different teams without having to coordinate between teams.
How it works
Private Service Connect makes it easy to consume services by leveraging service endpoints that are locally managed. The services can be in different projects or managed by different organizations. Access to the service is controlled by strict governance and IAM policies. Application teams and developers can focus on delivering their services easily by exposing their ‘service attachment’. No more worrying about networking constructs—Private Service Connect takes care of connecting to the service on the Google backbone for them.
Benefits to our partners
Being able to consume services from a variety of software vendors and service providers makes it possible for enterprises to innovate faster. For that, developers need to be able to compose services from third-party vendors, Google managed services, as well as their own services. To help, third-party partners can use Private Service Connect to deliver multi-tenant services securely and at massive scale, and make the connectivity to their services appear as if they are running on the enterprises’ network. Private Service Connect will also integrate with Service Directory to register many producer services, making service consumption even simpler.
“In today’s environment, where seamless access to real-time market information and the ability to handle increasingly vast volumes of data is essential, our clients are demanding native connectivity in the cloud. Google’s Private Service Connect offers the performance and reliability required by the types of mission critical apps that rely on Bloomberg’s tick for tick market data feed, B-PIPE.” —Cory Albert, Global Head of Cloud Strategy, Enterprise Data at Bloomberg
“One of the key goals for Elastic on Google Cloud is to monitor and protect our customers’ data. Google Cloud’s Private Service Connect with Elastic Cloud furthers our commitment to our customers that together we make it quick, easy and secure to gain insights and intelligence from their data.” —Uri Cohen, Product Lead for Elastic Cloud
“MongoDB’s partnership with Google is an integral part of our strategy to support modern apps and mission-critical databases and to become a cloud data company. Private Service Connect allows our customers to connect to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud seamlessly and securely and we’re excited for customers to have this additional and important capability.”—Andrew Davidson, VP of Cloud Product, MongoDB
Check out the Google Cloud Console to try it today.
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Modernizing apps on the cloud isn’t an “all or nothing” decision. Businesses want the option to modernize on-premises or choose multi-cloud solutions that meet their needs. That’s why we created a new solution for running apps anywhere – simply, flexibly, and securely. Embracing open standards, Anthos lets you run your applications, unmodified, on existing on-prem hardware investments or in the public cloud. So that you write once and deploy anywhere.
Download this report and find out how to:
- Decouple infrastructure and applications with containers and Kubernetes
- Decouple cloud teams from one another so they can work independently
- Meet the challenges of microservice management using service mesh
- Implement a zero-trust security model to enforce more granular controls while maintaining a consistent user experience
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APIs power all digital marketing channels and the apps we use today. APIs are a window on your company’s digital assets, exposing them so developers and partners can build mobile apps and become part of your innovation engine.
Thanks to the open API economy, you can build mobile apps that use a mix of APIs; you can combine location APIs with targeted promotions, or map your morning run with a calorie counter. Wrapping an API around your digital assets gets you into the game and builds value that wins customer loyalty and revenue. Marketing is about highlighting value, and promoting that value to customers.
This eBook highlights how APIs are evolving as the business technology that brings the CIO and CMO together. They bridge the gap between what the CMO needs to create value for customers and what the CIO needs to deliver a platform for a digital business. With alignment in place and technology that’s purpose-built for the requirements of the digital world, the potential to grow and succeed is limitless.
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