Case Study: Earth Networks achieves scalable, reliable API delivery and faster partner onboarding with Microsoft Azure

Weather data lights up more applications thanks to cloud-based API publishing

Earth Networks operates a global monitoring network for weather, lightning, and greenhouse gases and offers that data through its Sferic API to schools, airports, utilities, and government agencies. To grow the API business it needed to outsource partner registration, provisioning, usage monitoring, and billing and to ensure a stable, scalable delivery platform that could protect and manage access under heavy load.

The company adopted Microsoft Azure API Management with Azure Active Directory Premium and integrated provisioning with Salesforce for enterprise accounts while offering PayPal-based self-service subscriptions for smaller customers. The solution automated account creation and billing, added features like authentication, rate limiting and caching, and enabled Earth Networks to serve up to one billion API calls a month without interruptions, onboard very large customers, cut partner setup from about an hour to 5–10 minutes, and save roughly 20 hours a month in configuration work.

Earth Networks

Jay Fristedt

Enterprise Product Director