When it comes to delivering applications, what if you could SHIFT your timeline LEFT and turn out apps 25 to 50 percent faster with higher quality and less labor? What if you could SHIFT LEFT and achieve 100 percent return on your investment by the time you deliver your next application? What if you could SHIFT LEFT and make DevOps a reality?

In the application economy, every business is a software business.This is why DevOps is quickly becoming one of the most valuable disciplines for your business. It’s focused on improving the quality and speed of delivering new apps to market. And it’s about tightly integrating development and operations in order to do so.

This is driving businesses everywhere to take a second look at what they may have initially thought was just a buzzword – here one day and gone the next.

Now everyone is starting to wonder, “Can we adopt a DevOps method ourselves? And will it work for us?”

The application programming interface (API) may be an old concept but it is one that is undergoing a transformation as, driven by mobile and cloud requirements, more and more organizations are opening their information assets to external developers.

Today, 75% of Twitter traffic and 65% of Salesforce.com traffic comes through APIs. But APIs are not just for the social Web. According to ProgrammableWeb.com, the number of open APIs being offered publicly over the Internet now exceeds 2000—up from just 32 in 2005. Opening APIs up to outside developers enables many technology start-ups to become platforms, by fostering developer communities tied to their core data or application resources. This translates into new reach (think Twitter’s rapid growth), revenue (think Salesforce.com’s AppExchange) or end user retention (think Facebook).

OAuth puts the user in control of delegating access to an API. This allows one service to integrate with another service on behalf of that user. The same social Web providers who popularized the pattern of exposing an API to enable third-party developers to enrich their platforms were the first ones to apply such delegated authorization mechanisms. OAuth was defined in 2006, to standardize mechanisms of this kind.

Since the early days of computing, developers have struggled to make applications communicate. Specialized protocols, such as COM+, CORBA, and even SOAP, emerged over the years, but none were sufficient to meet the need for scale, simplicity, and cross-language functionality.

APIs are the technology behind this approach. APIs allow developers to create an open architecture for sharing functionality and data between applications. APIs are like windows into an application—a direct conduit that leads straight into the core functionality and data residing in the heart of the app.

Mobility is taking today’s world by storm. By 2017, mobile apps will be downloaded more than 268 billion times, generating revenue of more than $77 billion — making apps one of the most popular computing tools for users across the globe. Understandably, the pressure to deliver diverse apps to external and internal audiences is felt universally across every enterprise.

The best practice for API security architecture is to separate out API implementation and API security into distinct tiers. Under this model, an API developer can focus completely on the application domain, ensuring that each API is well designed and promotes integration between different apps. CA API Gateway provides the API security administrator with complete control over access control, threat detection, confidentiality, integrity and audit across every API the organization publishes.

Mobile technology is revolutionizing the corporate IT landscape. Enterprises want to leverage mobile to maximize employee productivity, efficiency and availability. Meanwhile, employees are already taking the initiative by using their own personal mobile devices for business purposes. For enterprises, the benefits of enterprise mobility and the reality of the “bring-your-own-device” (BYOD) movement are becoming impossible to ignore.

In his 1966 book “The Psychology of Science,” American psychologist Abraham Maslow tackled the idea that those in the field of psychology needed to approach treatment from multiple perspectives, to take on new ideas, and not just continue using the same theories and techniques created by Freud and his followers so many years ago. Acknowledging that changing your point of view can be difficult, Maslow wrote “[I]t is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything like a nail.” We have all had this experience. We get so used to the way things have been done in the past, we sometimes don’t question the reasons for doing them.