Publishing and consuming APIs securely at scale

We provided DHCW with a secure, fault-tolerant & cost-optimised solution for their cloud-based Application Programming Interface (API) management needs which is now supporting 150 million API calls per year.

Computacenter has provided DHCW with a secure, fault tolerant & cost optimised solution for their cloud based Application Programming Interface (API) management needs which is now supporting 150 million API calls per year.

Objective

DHCW required a modern, secure & scalable API Management solution, enabling their Health Boards and Trusts and external service providers to connect to a national API service, to store & retrieve data such as patient health records and organisational in for mation.

Solution

DHCW chose Computacenter to design and deliver their API Management solution needs, which required the following services:

• Design and delivery of a multi-region enterprise scale landing zone.
• Using our Landing Zone service, and working closely with the customer teams, we used purpose-built Terraform scripts to deploy folders and projects as per the agreed resource hierarchy, with organisational security policies, a shared VPC structure, and HA VPN tunnels for Apigee X provisioning with connectivity to backend legacy services hosted on-premise.
• Working with our Apigee delivery partner, we also supported the customer’s teams with the onboarding of the GCP platform, the Apigee X software, initial API development, and the provision of ongoing support.
• Acceleration of delivery using Infrastructure as Code and pre-built agile artefacts. Reselling & billing support was also delivered.

Outcome

• A highly secure, CIS compliant architecture, with policy based guardrails for onboarding workloads, and with data encryption delivered via Cloud KMS.
• A fault tolerant and cost optimised solution built to support 150 million API calls per year, and a solution which is compliant with DHCWs API Strategy and architecture for the enterprise.
• Centralised operations, including integration with Azure AD for centralised Identity and IAM, centralised cloud operations for monitoring and logging, and a shared Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) architecture with VPC peering to Apigee X projects.
• Automated delivery remotely deployed and managed via Terraform Infrastructure as Code (IaC ) for a project factory approach, and CI/CD pipeline for APIs.
• We worked with DHCW on a change request to the original contract to accommodate Cloud Armor (a network security service) into the environment, and to manage the consumption and billing process.