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Tech/Engineering

Data Management Processes Empowered with Actionable APIs

Amitkumar Sawant, Product Manager and Jude Daniel, Sr. Product Manager

Data is vital for organizations in technology. They rely on cloud solutions like Druva for scalable, secure, and flexible data management. Growing systems and applications pose challenges in siloed IT operations. Integration and automation through APIs drive digital transformation, enabling seamless data leverage. In this blog, we will explore the various use cases of APIs and how they are revolutionizing data management, with a specific focus on Druva's actionable APIs.

As a leading provider of cloud data protection and management solutions, Druva recognizes the importance of APIs in unlocking the full potential of data. Druva offers a robust set of APIs that allow customers to integrate, automate, and extend their data management capabilities. Whether it's fetching backup/restore status, initiating backup jobs, restoring data, or managing user access, Druva's APIs provide a comprehensive toolkit to drive operational efficiency and enable intelligent decision-making.

For a deeper dive into REST APIs and how they can help you gather valuable data insights, I encourage you to check out our previous blog: Gather your data insights with Druva REST APIs. Additionally, to understand how we effectively manage the APIs, you may find our blog on API lifecycle management insightful as well.

Rest APIs — Use Cases Druva Supports

IT Automation 

Identity and Access Mgmt

Security

DevOps

eDiscovery

Business Analytics

IT process automation, e.g.:

  • Auto creation of job failure tickets

  • Cross-correlation of CMDB and assets

  • Drive agility and reduce cost of IT operations


Single sign-on and automated end-user onboarding


Drive IT agility

Event correlation using SIEM


Automation of Incident response actions


Reduces risk to the organization


Monitoring job status


Automation of IT policies across new infrastructure


Reduces risk to the organization and help improve agility


Access to data for forensic and legal use cases


Reduces risk and solves legal purposes


Provide insights into consumption of services


Help optimize costs and risk


Under the Hood

Druva APIs are built on Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture in which a client-server model is used. The API client sends requests to the server over HTTPS (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) protocol which is first authenticated using a token. Druva supports OAuth 2.0 protocol of authentication and authorizations. OAuth is an open protocol for token-based authentication and authorization on the Internet. In order to generate a token, API credentials are used which are generated through Druva’s cloud console. The API credential is a combination of client ID and secret key and is equivalent to that of a username and password. A Druva cloud administrator can create and manage API credentials from the Druva console. As a Druva Cloud administrator, you can also provide these API credentials to the developers within your organization to integrate various applications, tools, services, and scripts with Druva products. 

Post-request authentication, the resource server processes the request and sends a response to the client with an appropriate HTTPS status code indicating either success or failure. This response is in the form of JSON format.

API diagram

Actionable API Endpoints and Use Cases

Let's take an example of a few use cases where these actionable APIs help in performing some tasks. Here we are taking VMware as a workload to highlight these use cases:

  1. On-Demand Backup — This API endpoint initiates on-demand backup of a configured VMware VM, you easily integrate this API with other tasks like OS refresh, hardening, etc., and automate all these tasks via playbooks. 

  2. Cancel a Job — Cancel any ongoing job using this API endpoint.  

  3. Restore VM to the Original Location — Restore a virtual machine to the original location. You could use this API endpoint to automate some tasks during DR or Ransomware readiness testing. 

  4. Quarantine Snapshots of a VM — Quarantine all snapshots or a range of snapshots for any workload including VMs. This ensures that administrators would not restore data from quarantined snapshots, especially for snapshots that might contain malware or malicious files. This use case might be embedded into a security playbook that supports threat investigation.

Conclusion

Actionable APIs have emerged as a game-changer in data management, enabling organizations to leverage the power of automation, collaboration, and customization. By embracing actionable APIs, businesses can optimize their data workflows, enhance cross-functional collaboration, and unlock valuable insights for driving innovation and growth.

Druva's commitment to actionable APIs empowers organizations to harness the full potential of their data by seamlessly integrating their data management processes into their existing systems and workflows. 

Next Steps

You can find more details and information on our APIs from our developer portal. The portal allows you to visualize and interact with API resources without having any of the implementation logic in place. You can run any API endpoint as a standalone REST API call from within the developer portal to view the response structure or receive one-time output for your backup resources. Adding to it, visual documentation on the portal makes it easy for implementation and consumption.