What Are Enterprise Architects, Developers, and Security Professionals Thinking?

Have you ever wondered what keeps your enterprise architects, security officers, and developers up at night? Building an integrated, scalable, and winning digital strategy requires that you understand the perspectives of each of these groups and invest in solutions that meet the needs of all. But this is easier said than done.

We spoke directly to EAs, security professionals, and developers to hear about their challenges, the roles and responsibilities that excite them, their views on the future of mobile and APIs, and how they've invested in technology to better perform their jobs and meet key business objectives. The results were fascinating and show that these groups share many of the same priorities.

Take a look at some of the stats below.

Top Concerns for Security Professionals

The top concern for security professionals is securing legacy systems and new technologies, of which 54% indicated as a challenge. At 46%, the second largest concern is balancing security with user experience in mobile apps. When including only responses from Fortune 500 companies, these numbers jumped to 60% each.

An engineer at a large enterprise retail company said, "I think that usability and security working together is the key to success" (Source TechValidate. TVID: Others echoed the challenges of achieving both strong security and user experience simultaneously.

Top Concerns for Developers

Developers also had concerns about security, especially in the context of mobile applications. 63% of developers indicated that securing apps and APIs is a key challenge they currently face. 42% cited cross-platform development as a concern. Including only responses from global 500s, these numbers jumped to 78% and 44% of developers, respectfully. In large organizations, developers are taking a more active role in end-to-end security.

The role of the developer has evolved from behind-the-scenes to a key player in the security, integration, and mobile enablement of modern enterprises. An IT Project Manager at a large enterprise financial services company described modern developers as "key partners in the progress of the organization" (Source TechValidate. TVID: 297-12D-3F5).

Top Concerns for Enterprise Architects

As the architects — for lack of a better word — in today's organizations, EAs are focused on orchestrating a standard security context, integrating all systems, and coordinating development, with an end goal of digital transformation.

For 66% of EAs, the top challenge they face is providing consistent, end-to-end security. Interestingly enough, 55% cited creating APIs and microservices as a challenge, showing the overlap in priorities between developers and EAs.

Including only responses from global 500s, these numbers rose to 77% and 62%, respectively. And another top concern emerged — managing integrations or a partner ecosystem, noted by 62% of EAs at these companies. For large organizations like global 500s, partner, device, application, and service integrations can be significant in both number and complexity.

One Data/Application Architect at a large enterprise real estate company observed that the EA "empowers the organization to adapt at every scale in this exponentially growing IoT age" (Source TechValidate. TVID: F08-AD0-62F).

Another remarked:

A Solution for EAs, Developers, and Security Professionals Alike

Given these challenges, is there a solution that will meet the needs of all these stakeholders while addressing mobile development, security, integration, orchestration, and scale for the future? The answer is full lifecycle API management.

But don't just take our word for it. Here's what our customers with these challenges had to say:

• 90% of security specialists rate CA API Management's authentication capabilities as stronger compared to the competition (Source: TechValidate. TVID: C46-2AE-215)
• 84% of developers agree that CA API Management provides a robust and comprehensive digital transformation solution by extending the API lifecycle with powerful developer tools (Source: TechValidate. TVID: 6A4-B1D-70A)
• 83% of enterprise architects agree that CA API Management enables them to deliver digital initiatives at speed, security, and scale (Source: TechValidate. TVID: DB5-E36-9BF)

Learn more about API security.

Read about CA API Gateway, which one Senior IT Architect at a Global 500 chemicals company described as "a quick win for our company" (Source: TechValidate. TVID: 3D5-A0B-C7D).

Explore our portfolio of solutions across the full API lifecycle.