IBM DataPower Gateway vs Microsoft Azure API Management comparison

IBM DataPower Gateway is a robust, secure next-generation enterprise-grade single multichannel API gateway that supplies dynamic access, integration, control, and outstanding security. The solution is available in a broad range of workload capabilities, including application programming interface (API), service oriented architecture (SOA), B2B, cloud, web, and mobile. These dynamic capabilities ensure users are able to quickly increase the reach of an organization's critical IT resources to new channels, which will provide shareholders, team members, and clients with safe, secure access at all times.

DataPower Gateway is very flexible and is widely available in virtual, cloud, traditional, physical, Docker, and Linux form factors.

IBM DataPower Gateway Features

IBM DataPower Gateway has many value-added features. Some of these features are included below:

• Control: The solution provides decision point authorization and authentication for all standards, including Lightweight Direct Access Protocol (LDAP) and Open Authorization (OAuth), which allow for better access control across an organization’s entire network.
  
• DataPower dashboard: The dashboard is specifically designed to enhance performance and determine problematic processes. The solution provides intuitive real-time performance transparency to diagnose operational and performance anomalies and offer repair and restoration recommendations.
  
• Enhanced messaging: Users are able to easily mediate messaging and protocols by incorporating the best of today’s traditional and modern application standards.
  
• Integration: IBM DataPower Gateway offers super fast mainframe connectivity, database connectivity, transport protocol bridging, content-based routing, and any-to-any message transformation, ensuring secure and immediate connect service.

IBM DataPower Gateway Benefits

IBM DataPower Gateway provides many benefits. Some of those benefits include:

• Flexibility: The solution is easy to use and configure and provides for a pleasant, intuitive overall user experience. The solution can immediately be used out of the box, which makes overall process management simple.
  
• Protection: The solution provides sturdy continuous service protection and application performance using robust powerful routing and traffic control.
  
• Security: The solution’s enterprise-grade De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) ready gateway enables users to enforce the desired runtime application security across all messaging protocols.
  
• Profitability: The solution’s design ensures significant reduction of development costs in addition to the streamlining of overall operations. Users are able to achieve reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and experience a near-immediate ROI.

Reviews from Real Users

“My company has a good impression of IBM DataPower Gateway. What I like about it is that because it's an appliance, it's a turnkey solution that's very fast and out of the box. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products.”- Bálint T., Solution Manager at Intalion

“You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present. From a security point of view, being an appliance in the DMC zone, IBM DataPower Gateway will take care of the entire security angle for the infrastructure.” - Sathyan K., Founder/Director at perfTech Solutions Pvt Ltd

Microsoft Azure API Management is a reliable and scalable way to publish, consume, and manage APIs running on an Microsoft Azure platform. Azure API Management provides all essential tools required for end-to-end management of APIs. It ensures optimal performance of the APIs by tracking and enforcing usage and authentication.

Microsoft Azure API Management is primarily used to provide a central interface to create, provision, and manage APIs for web and cloud applications and services. Today's innovative enterprises are adopting API architectures to accelerate growth. With Microsoft Azure API Management, businesses can streamline their work across hybrid and multi cloud environments with a unified place to manage all their APIs.

Microsoft Azure API Management Features

Microsoft Azure API Management has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Manage APIs across clouds and on premises: Optimize API traffic flow by deploying API gateways side by side with the APIs hosted in Azure, other clouds, and on premises. Meet security and compliance requirements with a unified management experience and full visibility across all APIs.
  
• Customized usage limits: By applying authentication, authorization, and usage limits, you can protect your resources by controlling how data and services are exposed to employees, partners, and customers.
  
• API-first approaches: Accelerate your business by building apps faster and delivering immediate value to customers through API-first approaches. This helps you decouple front- and back-end teams through API mocking, API revisions and versioning, and automated API documentation.
  
• Customizable developer portal: Improve API discoverability by creating a customizable developer portal for all your APIs. This enables you to simply manage and share APIs with internal teams, external partners, and customers.
  
• Facades for back-end services: Transform your existing services and automatically turn legacy web services into modern REST-based APIs using facades.
• Security for your API’s: Keep all your APIs behind a single static IP or domain, and help protect them with tokens, keys, and IP filtering.

Microsoft Azure API Management Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Microsoft Azure API Management. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Monitor the health of APIs, configure throttling, identify errors, and rate limits.
  
• Enforce flexible and fine-grained quotas and rate limits. Modify the shape and behavior of your APIs using policies. Improve latency and scale your APIs with response caching.
  
• Connect on-premises APIs to cloud services by creating a façade that lets you safely integrate.
  
• Create and manage user roles and define end-to-end API usage policies.
  
• Consolidate and manage thousands of APIs across multiple platforms in a central interface.

Reviews from Real Users

Microsoft Azure API Management stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its DevOps integration, its easy setup, and its dynamic pricing. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Cecil S., a Software Engineer, writes of the solution, “The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure API Management is the developer portal because it's very quick and easy to get something published."

Dmitri E., an Integration Architect at MiBanco, notes, “In particular, in API Management, used as front-end APIs, it's easy to manage. We use Microsoft due to the stability of the company. It is easy to set up. The solution is scalable. It is stable as a product as well.”