APIs are commonly used to “bridge gaps,” enabling organizations to ship critical business data between departments, companies, applications, clouds, geographies, or across other IT/infosec boundaries. Despite progress in API tooling, APIs themselves stubbornly remain “ignorant pipes.” Without massive, continuous API polling activity, data sharing parties are left with data that becomes inconsistent, incorrect, and outdated.

Operational databases offer low latency, high-throughput, and (at least in the cloud) highly available solutions for application storage and transaction processing. But by their nature, they are owned and operated by a single entity, not multiple parties. This makes it impossible to materialize content in another company’s IT infrastructure so that it’s guaranteed to be accurate without massive custom investment from all parties. And, despite knowing the customer’s data model in detail, databases offer no help when it comes to crafting model-centric APIs or other elements of a data sharing stack.

Blockchains achieve an ordered, consistent representation of data that can span clouds, companies, geographies, and IT stack technology choices. But their high latency, lack of support for files, limited “one box” deployment model, and disregard for cloud integration make them one of the least successful enterprise adoption stories in the history of IT. In addition, to recreate the most basic features that a cloud database offers, their lack of a data model requires application developers to spend months or even years developing object-relational mapping (ORM) and other extensions (e.g., file support and transactions) on top of a blockchain’s primitive key/value store.

Vendia Share combines all three technologies. We’re using the best of API, database, and blockchain technology to create a multi-party data sharing solution that resolves the limitations of each standalone technology. Starting from a customer-provided data model, Vendia Share generates

• A custom and customer data model-centric API
• A scalable and compliant cloud storage tier
• A full spectrum of consistent data sharing and access controls that work across different applications, companies, clouds, and geographies

And delivers it all with SaaS simplicity and zero infrastructure footprint to own or manage. Vendia relieves developers from having to “piece together” all the elements of cloud infrastructure, on different clouds, in order to build applications and data platforms that can effortlessly span those gaps.

Customers use Vendia’s operational data and API platform to quickly create a variety of secure, fault-tolerant solutions:

• Ticketing systems
• Mortgage and insurance settlement
• Supply chain and logistics tracking
• Business contract tracking
• And much more

Compared to manually building point-to-point solutions using bespoke code and self-managed infrastructure, Vendia offers up to a much faster time to market, lower ongoing operational and maintenance costs, and lower development costs.

Dive deeper

Read more about why and how API, database, and blockchain technology can’t efficiently or sufficiently create a multi-party, real-time data sharing alliance on their own.

Then, take a look at how Vendia Share combines blockchain, database, and API technology for enterprise-grade data sharing—without sacrificing security or data governance.

To see if your use case could benefit from a data-centric API approach or a data sharing platform, contact Vendia.