Announced this week, Apigee Enterprise Cloud PCI is a new offering designed to provide transactional APIs for deployment on a public cloud. Apigee asserts that this is the only cloud-based API management tool on the market that supports full compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

Apigee's call to developers centers on a proposition to tap the vast compute resources of the cloud to support its transactional API traffic, but with the confidence that all sensitive customer data remains protected.

"To fully protect critical customer credit-card information, there's an increased focus on compliance just now, especially as more e-commerce services shift to cloud computing and APIs," said Chet Kapoor, Apigee CEO.

"The extensive time and resources necessary to comply with industry regulations has prevented many forward-thinking retailers from extending their e-commerce strategies with APIs. The Apigee Enterprise Cloud API also protects and screens sensitive data flowing between an application and an API residing on a public cloud, so businesses can now confidently broaden their e-commerce network with transactional APIs," added Kapoor.

Apigee suggests that due to the high cost associated with building and supporting scalable, secure, PCI-compliant APIs, the vast majority of APIs offered today are for catalog-type applications that enable viewing data, but not transacting with it.

The company's approach is to provide free tools that make it easier for developers and providers to explore and use APIs. The new Apigee Enterprise Cloud PCI solution is deployed in PCI-compliant data centers, where cardholder information is protected according to PCI DSS.

"Developers need APIs that don't place undue burdens on them. As a developer, I don't want to deal with the extra security required to store sensitive financial data in my app or anywhere else — so a well-designed API should take care of this for me, and the provider should take responsibility for handling the data correctly," said Sam Ramji, VP of strategy at Apigee.