How to effectively build a hybrid SaaS API management strategy

– By Andy Thurai (@AndyThurai) and Blake Dournaee (@Dournaee). This article was originally published on Gigaom

Summary: Enterprises seeking agility are turning to the cloud while those concerned about security are holding tight to their legacy, on-premise hardware. But what if there’s a middle ground?

If you’re trying to combine both a legacy and a cloud deployment strategy without having to do everything twice a hybrid strategy might offer the best of both worlds. We discussed that in our first post API Management – Anyway you want it!.

In that post, we discussed the different API deployment models as well as the need to understand the components of API management, your target audience and your overall corporate IT strategy. There was a tremendous readership and positive comments on the article. (Thanks for that!). But, there seem to be a little confusion about one particular deployment model we discussed – the Hybrid (SaaS) model. We heard from a number of people asking for more clarity on this model. So here it is.

Meet Hybrid SaaS

A good definition of Hybrid SaaS would be “Deploy the software, as a SaaS service and/or as on-premises solution, make those instances co-exist, securely communicate between each other, and be a seamless extension of each other.”