What is API governance?

API governance sets the framework and strategy that informs API management. The goal of API governance is to produce discoverable, secure, scalable and reusable APIs. In short, effective API governance yields higher quality, more valuable APIs and a better user experience.

API governance promotes consistency within an organization’s API ecosystem to ensure that APIs adhere to a common standard and align with business strategy. These standards and policies are enforced through checks and validation. For instance, effective governance helps make sure that APIs contain the metadata needed for internal and external partners to easily use them.

Many organizations, particularly those undergoing a digital transformation, need to integrate legacy systems with newer ones. By setting and applying standards for elements like protocols and languages, API governance helps ensure that APIs can operate seamlessly across different environments and systems. Governance models often have subsets of rules for different API protocols or use cases that enable an organization to tailor governance around specific business needs and initiatives.

API governance also helps reduce redundancy (when teams build new services instead of reusing existing integrations) and prevents an organization from developing or integrating services it doesn’t need. This helps reduce the overall costs associated with API management. Governance also helps reduce API sprawl (when numerous independently developed and managed APIs are spread across various departments) and the inconsistencies and security vulnerabilities API sprawl can cause.

API governance is important because it helps ensure API availability and security as IT environments become more complex, and organizations rely more heavily on microservices and apps (such as SaaS solutions) distributed across various environments. API governance enables an organization to safely expose business capabilities and functions, making them available for consumption by both internal and external clients.

This is especially true for large enterprises, many of which use thousands of APIs.¹ Effective API governance ensures that an organization’s API program operates efficiently and cohesively, and aligns with business goals. For example, it enables an organization to create APIs that can be used to integrate legacy systems into composite services as well as interact with more modern applications and services hosted in the cloud.

API governance is also important because it helps reduce redundancy and mitigate the risks that accompany API sprawl. Governance makes it easier for stakeholders to know what capabilities already exist (and how to use them) and what functions might need to be developed. API governance policies help standardize API design and API development, ensuring that newly developed APIs work in concert with other modular APIs. Governance also helps ensure that APIs remain compliant with regulatory bodies and that organizations enact and enforce adequate security measures.

API governance is especially important for organizations pursuing an API-first strategy. In an API-first strategy, APIs are treated as strategic business assets given priority during the development process, rather than as something to address after application development. Governance policies can help ensure that all APIs are modular and interoperable, and that any new APIs added to the environment deliver new value and work as intended.

While these terms are related, and essential to API health in all phases of the API lifecycle, they are distinct concepts. API governance sets the standards and best practices that provide an API strategy and framework for management. API management is the implementation of API governance principles across the API portfolio, centralizing control and analysis. Effective API management ensures that the organization follows security policies and protocols, such as the use of OAuth and encryption.

API management ensures consistency and control across an API environment. It is crucial to ensuring API quality and helping organizations unlock the full potential of APIs. An API management platform centralizes control and uses a suite of tools to optimize deployment, documentation and information sharing across teams.

Management platforms often include an API gateway, developer portal, API documentation, API catalog, analytics tools and an API lifecycle management component. API management platforms enable organizations to rapidly create, share, monitor and adjust APIs, gain greater lifecycle observability, expand the reach of APIs, better monetize APIs and more.

API security refers to the policies and procedures that protect an organization’s APIs from malicious actors, misuse and cybersecurity threats. The principles established in an API governance strategy guide API security policies.

For example, security policies might dictate that an API gateway always be used to decouple back-end services and front-end applications to help block SQL injection attacks. Policy might require that a standard authentication method be used in all cases, or define different methods for different types of data.

Effective API governance encompasses, and shapes the way an enterprise approaches, both API management and API security. API governance defines the policies that help an organization use its APIs efficiently, which includes determining how to manage APIs and keep them safe from cybersecurity threats.

A comprehensive view of an organization’s entire API landscape is needed to create clear, consistent API standards. The more APIs in use, the more complex this exercise can become. To ensure effective policies, organizations aim to follow certain best practices in their governance design, including:

One of the main reasons to employ API governance is to ensure that the myriad APIs an organization uses are high-quality, streamlined and standardized. This might include adopting a coding standard like OpenAPI Specification (OAS), which defines a standard format for REST APIs. The implementation of such standards can also improve an APIs scalability.

It’s also important to make metadata fields for APIs consistent to ensure that all APIs are easily discoverable and reusable. Organizations must store these policies and procedures in a centralized, accessible location so that everyone within the organization who needs to access them can do so. These standards should be used enterprise-wide to make sure that all APIs follow the same model throughout the API lifecycle.

Checking that APIs always adhere to governance guidelines would be an arduous task if someone had to check every single one by hand. Self-service governance tools and API management applications can validate and enforce an organization’s governance policies across environments, and automation can make the process much more reliable and efficient.

By building automated governance checks into API review processes—for example, ensuring that developers use a common data model—organizations can make sure that APIs adhere to guidelines from development on through deployment and use. Automation is not necessarily a replacement for manual reviews—the two are most effective in tandem—but automation helps eliminate errors from the inspection process, increase delivery speed and make governance policies more efficient.

Organization’s often test, modify, extend and redeploy APIs to make them more efficient or to optimize workflows as the business changes and scales. To ensure that APIs comply with governance policies across all versions, and to track changes between versions, API versioning must be rigorous and consistent.

Making sure that API iterations are transparent and clearly delineate between changes that are, or are not, compatible with an earlier version helps save time, money and headaches. Following major, minor and patch versioning is considered a best practice.²

Governance structures aren’t useful if they are so rigid that they prevent an organization from using APIs it would otherwise benefit from, or if they significantly slow development speed. In some instances, governance rules written with one use case in mind might not be appropriate for another use case. For example, an API that’s used in an internal developer portal might need different protocols than one meant for a public marketplace.

Likewise, for different lines of business. Different parts of an organization might use the same APIs in different ways. For example, one team might need a bespoke error code when certain conditions are triggered that isn’t relevant or necessary for other teams. Governance policies should be flexible enough to allow for such exceptions and should not get in the way of DevOps and other agile methodologies.

For API governance policies to function as intended, organizations must empower DevOps teams and other stakeholders to implement them without outside intervention. Enforcing governance policies might involve training, creating new API tools to make governance easier, and making information about governance policies as accessible as possible. In an API-first environment, this level of discoverability is especially important.

As organizations progress in their digital transformation, they will likely use a greater number of APIs. Managing a complex portfolio of APIs, with many dependencies, can make it complicated to create overarching API governance policies without stifling creativity and development. Automating parts of the governance process, like API deployment and monitoring, checks and validation, can help streamline this aspect of API governance. Automation can also help promote consistency across an enterprise’s governance policies and strategy as the API environment becomes more complex.

Another major challenge in API governance is creating security policies that protect an enterprise’s APIs. API security breaches can lead to consequential data leaks and other incidents that put the business—and clients—at risk. Building robust security policies into API governance, and implementing automated checks to ensure policies are followed, can help protect sensitive data, and keep systems up and running smoothly.

Poor API governance policies can also be a hindrance on development since they introduce additional steps into the development process. By making sure that governance policies and checks occur at all stages of an API’s lifecycle, an organization can prevent the bottlenecks created when compliance checks occur sporadically or only before deployment.

Writing governance policies with flexibility and empowerment in mind also helps to mitigate this challenge, as does an understanding that governance leaders should review, test and change governance policies if they are not working as intended.

API governance establishes best practices and standards that help organizations build API environments that drive innovation and growth. Properly implemented policies create a consistent, secure environment that enables an organization to both integrate legacy systems and databases as well as build new composite services.

In addition, API governance can: