I was trying to get access to the API for one of my companies systems, however I was ultimately denied because ‘APIs are used for automation of interfaces and allowing access could impact performance’. I suspect that a non-technical individual was consulted and that is why my request was denied (the first question was whether it would be for individual use or company wide use, at the moment I just want to play around with automating a few things so I said just for me).

Does this sound like a valid reason to deny access? I would be pulling down maybe a few gigabytes of data a month (just raw data no images or anything), which is not very significant as there are thousands of daily users on this system. I am not super technical, but it seems pretty straightforward to rate limit the keys if this is the main concern. I have used APIs for twitter, instagram, stock exchanges, etc before and I figure if allowing access to APIs had a large potential to impact performance, these would not be so publicly available.

The suggestion was to use a different system (which I was trying to avoid because it merges data from multiple systems and is not clean, so I wanted to recreate some functions myself) or run it through my finance team who owns the system, but are not technical.

I would like to avoid having to commit to actually creating something if I get access as it is just a side project to do when I have free time, so this is not my preferred route but I don’t want to push if it impacting performance of the system is a legitimate concern.

Thanks

This is a more conceptual question, rather than actual code I have tried