• Importance: API governance provides standards and practices for seamless integration and robust security.
• Case Studies: Real-world examples underscore the significance of proper API governance.
• Components: API governance encompasses standardization, security, quality, versioning, compliance, reusability, and monitoring.
• Challenges: Implementing API governance can be hindered by a lack of strategy, resistance to change, and resource limitations.
• Considerations: To overcome challenges, organizations should focus on clear strategy, collaboration, documentation, resource allocation, flexibility, and measurement.
• Conclusion: Effective API governance balances control and innovation, driving consistency and security in API ecosystems.

In recent years, organizations have had to deal with an increased velocity of API delivery, coupled with security concerns that only increase with the number of APIs exposed by your organization. 

At the same time, organizations are tasked with ensuring the APIs they build are consistently designed to offer a great developer experience to developers within and outside the organization. How can organizations facing the need to react quickly to new markets need to ensure they can tackle these challenges effectively? 

When implemented properly, API governance can address these concerns without slowing down your delivery pipeline. Let's take a deeper look at API governance, learn from some real-world case studies to avoid making the same mistakes, and finally examine some considerations for establishing your own lightweight API governance as part of a complete API management strategy.

Why is API governance an essential element of API management?

Your API consumers don't want to be surprised when they integrate your API into their solution. Whether the API consumer is an internal developer, partner, or customer, offering a clear set of standards and practices will drive consistency across your API portfolio and speed up their integration efforts. 

Additionally, your organization and API consumers want to ensure that your APIs offer proper security controls to prevent unauthorized access. APIs deployed outside an API gateway expose a surface area ready for malicious activity. APIs deployed improperly behind an API gateway may expose excessive data and sensitive API operations. 

So how are your organization's APIs designed consistently and secured? This is the role of API governance. It should drive consistency across the organization's API surface area while offering sufficient flexibility to support changing requirements.

Case studies in API governance

Let's look at three case studies that help us better understand the value of establishing lightweight API governance in your organization:

Case Study #1: T-Mobile: Near the end of 2022, personal data was accessed via an API that didn't have the proper authorization settings configured on the API gateway when it was deployed. A small configuration that was incorrect or missing resulted in the leaking of the personal data of 37 million customers. 

Case Study #2: Optus: In Q3 of 2022, Optus released details about a data breach that exposed 10 million customer accounts. Like T-Mobile, this was an error related to security configuration. In this case, it was an API that did not require any kind of credentials to be used:

> “In the instance, where [sic] a public API endpoint did not require authentication, anyone on the internet with knowledge of that endpoint [URL] could use it,” said senior manager of cyber security consulting for Moss Adams, Corey J Ball. “If that endpoint was used to access customer data, then anyone on the internet could have used that endpoint to gather customer data."

Ball went on to explain: 

> “Without technical controls for authentication and authorization in place, any user could have requested any other user’s information. The attacker likely scripted the process to repeat requests from the endpoint until they had collected millions of instances of personally identifiable information."

Case Study #3: Anonymous Fintech: A few years ago, a fintech company requested a third-party company to audit their systems. It was discovered that dozens of APIs were deployed without authorization controls. It circumvented the API gateway entirely, along with their API governance processes. These issues were resolved, and no malicious activity was discovered due to this lack of security around some of their internal APIs. The root cause was determined to be an executive who granted an exception of skipping their API governance process to deliver their workstream faster. Since then, executives have been educated on the need for proper API security, and automation was used to prevent this from happening again. 

In all three case studies, we see areas where misconfiguration (or no security configuration) was responsible for the potential or actual security breach. Proper API governance helps by providing checks throughout the API lifecycle to prevent missing configuration data. In the third case study, APIs circumvented the governance process for speed-to-market. All three could have benefitted from automation throughout the API lifecycle rather than a single check.

What is included in API governance?

API governance is comprised of the following concerns:

Standardization: API governance enforces consistency in API design through an API style guide. This makes it easier for developers to understand and use APIs by reducing the learning curve and boosting productivity. Linters help to automate many of the API style guide elements to speed up compliance checks and make them available during, rather than after, the design process.

Security: Proper governance ensures that APIs adhere to security policies and guidelines, protecting sensitive data and systems from unauthorized access, data breaches, and other vulnerabilities. This can be done through automated or manual checks for proper configuration and declaration of security rules within an OpenAPI Specification or other assets. 

Quality and performance: API governance helps maintain and improve the quality of APIs, addressing performance issues and ensuring that they meet the expectations of both internal and external consumers. This may be done by defining one or more service level agreements (SLAs) that the API promises to consumers. Automated tooling can enforce the existence of these SLAs, and runtime monitoring can detect when they exceed their predefined limits.

Versioning and lifecycle management: Governance is critical in managing API versions and their respective lifecycles, ensuring smooth transitions, and minimizing disruptions to dependent systems and users. API style guides often provide details about what is considered breaking vs. non-breaking changes. Automation tools can help detect breaking changes during the design and delivery phases of the API lifecycle before the changes are introduced to API consumers. 

Compliance: Regulated industries, such as banking, require additional compliance checks for their API designs. API governance helps organizations adhere to industry regulations and standards, reducing non-compliance risk and associated penalties. It can also provide clear guidance on specific API gateway instances designed to monitor and manage APIs that require compliance with these regulatory requirements.

Reusability and collaboration: A well-governed API ecosystem encourages the reusability of existing APIs, reducing duplication of efforts and fostering collaboration among teams. This is done through a clear API taxonomy, which helps to ensure related APIs are located in the same area of an API portfolio (also known as high cohesion). Developers can quickly find and leverage existing APIs through design consistency via an API style guide rather than building their own. APIs can also be bundled into reusable API products for specific market segments. 

Monitoring and analytics: Defining clear runtime metrics and performance goals helps API governance mandates to be monitored and reported on over time. This enables organizations to make data-driven decisions, optimize API performance, and identify potential issues before they escalate.

Now that we understand more about API governance's value to an API program let's examine some challenges you may encounter when setting up API governance.

The challenges of setting up API governance:

Setting up API governance can be challenging. A lack of clear strategy and objectives may prevent organizations from aligning governance efforts with business goals. Implementing API governance involves changes in processes, technology, and organizational culture. The lack of clear and appropriate metrics makes it challenging to measure the effectiveness of API governance efforts and quantify the benefits of API governance.

Organizations may experience resistance to change when the strategy and objectives need to be clearly stated and repeated often. This can result in people trying to circumvent the process, as our previous case studies demonstrated. Resistance may be shown as a result of overly strict governance, stifling creativity. Excessive flexibility may lead to inconsistencies and vulnerabilities. Finding a balanced and flexible governance approach should help provide guardrails to prevent design inconsistencies and lack of security while giving room for addressing emerging needs of the marketplace.

With clear process documentation, it becomes easier for developers to understand and adhere to governance policies, leading to API design, implementation, and usage inconsistencies. Additionally, a lack of dedicated resources, including personnel, technology, and budget, can limit the effectiveness of an API governance program. Finally, remember that integration with existing processes and systems can be challenging. Integrating API governance with existing methods, such as change management and incident response, can be complex. Ensuring seamless integration while minimizing disruptions is a significant challenge.

Considerations for Establishing API Governance:

To overcome the challenges associated with setting up API governance, organizations should adopt the following approaches:

Develop a clear strategy and objectives: Establish a comprehensive API governance strategy that aligns with the organization's business goals. Define clear objectives, identify key stakeholders, and outline the scope and depth of the governance initiative. Regularly review and update the strategy to ensure it remains relevant and practical.

Foster a culture of collaboration and communication: Promote a culture that encourages collaboration, open communication, and knowledge sharing among teams. Engage stakeholders early in the governance process, and address their concerns to minimize resistance to change. Provide training and support to help employees adapt to new processes and tools. Implementing a change management or request for comment (RFC) approach to your API style guide and governance processes provides opportunities for shared ownership of the governance process. 

Document your governance processes: Ensure all governance policies, guidelines, and best practices are well-documented and easily accessible. Use clear and concise language, provide examples, and update documentation regularly to reflect changes in policies or technology. Use headings to support deep linking to specific topics when questions arise. 

Establish a budget for adequate resources: Dedicate sufficient resources, including personnel, budget, and technology, to API governance initiatives. Establish a governance team with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, and ensure they have the tools and support necessary to succeed. Side-of-desk approaches to API governance rarely succeed and only cause teams to try and circumvent processes that can lead to inconsistent API designs and avoidable security breaches. 

Balance flexibility and control: Implement governance policies that balance enforcing consistency and allowing innovation. Encourage a culture of experimentation within defined boundaries and regularly review procedures to ensure they remain effective without stifling creativity. This can be done through a short list of required governance policies and recommendations encouraging more profound compliance when circumstances permit. 

Measure and evaluate success: Define clear metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of API governance initiatives. Track these metrics regularly to identify areas for improvement and demonstrate the value of governance efforts to stakeholders. Continuously refine and optimize the governance process based on data-driven insights.

Final Thoughts:

When implemented properly, API governance can address these concerns without slowing down your delivery pipeline. This means overcoming change management challenges, inflexible policies, and limited insight into governance effectiveness. By addressing these challenges, organizations can successfully establish a robust API governance framework that drives their API ecosystem's consistency, security, and efficiency.