Extract from Jim Gill’s article “When it Comes to Collecting SaaS Data for Ediscovery, APIs May Not Be Enough”
Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have experienced phenomenal growth over the past few years, and this trend is continuing. In fact, one source states that at the end of 2021, 99% of organizations were using one or more SaaS solutions. According to the 2020 SaaS Trends Report conducted by Blisfully, medium and large enterprises with employees ranging from 100-1000+ employees, used on average 288 different applications within their organization. More significantly, there is a 60% app turnover rate, meaning new data sources are continually introduced into an organization’s enterprise data landscape.
With the growth of SaaS applications, many legal and compliance teams, as well as the software and service providers that support them, have mostly relied on APIs to preserve and gain access to the data held within enterprise SaaS systems.
What is an API and How Do Legal Departments Use Them
API stands for Application Programming Interfaces; these interfaces create a connection between their native format and other software to share information with an outside program while keeping internal details of its system hidden. APIs may be custom-built for a specific pair of systems or created to allow for interoperability.
