API sprawl is the uncontrolled growth and proliferation of APIs within an organization, resulting both from the exponential growth in the number of APIs in modern IT architectures and the use of APIs across globally distributed digital environments. Taken together, this explosion of APIs represents a growing challenge: As organizations build and deploy more APIs, often without a unified strategy or central oversight, they become increasingly difficult to manage effectively. What’s required is an API governance process and tools to help address the significant operational and security challenges that API sprawl brings to organizations like yours.
Why has API sprawl become a problem? The widespread adoption of modern, microservices-based application architectures has significantly contributed to the proliferation of APIs, which serve as the connective fabric that links modular services and components that make up today’s applications. APIs can simplify and speed up development cycles allowing developers to easily integrate with existing data and reuse functionality or integrate with third-party services rather than build everything from scratch.
Additionally, with 94% of organizations deploying applications across multiple environments, APIs are used to connect many of these disparate services and data sets across diverse platforms and locations. This fragmentation makes it increasingly difficult to ensure consistent API quality, visibility, and security. Even maintaining a comprehensive and up-to-date API inventory has become a complex challenge for many organizations.
This blog post digs into the concepts behind API governance, so read on to learn what API governance is, and how it differs from API management and API security. You’ll also learn about the three models of API governance, and explore best practice strategies.
API governance refers to the set of policies and standards that define how APIs are designed, built, secured, monitored, and maintained. The goal of API governance is to promote API quality, consistency, security, and regulatory compliance. It embraces all types of APIs including those developed internally as well as third-party APIs from partners or vendors.
In addition, as more companies adopt modern, API-first strategies, where the design of applications starts with the services and APIs, governance becomes even more critical because it ensures consistency, security, and compliance are built into the application at the API level.
The API governance process should cover the entire API lifecycle, and encompasses the following areas:
API governance, management, and security are closely interrelated but distinct areas, and governance should be implemented first to ensure that API management and API security practices are deployed consistently.
API management is the implementation of API governance policies using tools such as a developer portal, API gateway, and API lifecycle management software. These are often bundled into an API management platform. Governance policies may define both the tooling requirements—for instance, mandating standardized platforms across teams—and operational practices, such as how API keys and credentials must be managed.
API security is the enforcement of security and compliance requirements as defined by API governance policies. While some organizations rely on dedicated API security tools, there is growing adoption of web application and API protection (WAAP) solutions to achieve broader, integrated protection. Governance policies may specify the minimum security requirements for APIs, including the baseline controls needed and configuration guidelines, such as how API gateways, WAFs and/or API protection solutions should defend against possible attacks across all threat vectors. These may include the web app, API, and automated threats OWASP Top 10 lists, plus promote API hygiene best practices, such as avoiding hard-coded API keys or embedding them in client library source code.
There are three types of API governance models: centralized, decentralized, and adaptive:
Centralized governance is managed by a central team responsible for defining, reviewing, and approving all governance policies. Advantages of this approach: it enables the strictest governance policies and can dictate consistency across the organization. On the other hand, a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t always work, and can slow development teams and encourage workarounds and the rise of "shadow IT."
Decentralized governance gives individual teams autonomy to manage their own API governance policies. On the positive side, this approach promotes faster development and greater flexibility tailored to the needs of each team. However, decentralization may mean inconsistent API policies and controls across the organization, which can lead to integration challenges, configuration errors, and compliance gaps.
Adaptive governance strikes a balance between the two models above. A central team establishes global policies and manages shared infrastructure, while development teams are empowered to define local policies aligned with the specific needs of their applications and APIs. These can include regional, governmental, or industry-specific compliance requirements. In most situations, adaptive governance delivers the best of both worlds, as this model establishes clear distinctions between which policies must be followed universally and areas where flexibility is allowed when needed.
F5 offers API management and security solutions across the entire API lifecycle as part of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platford (ADSP). The platform supports comprehensive API delivery paired with complete discovery, continuous monitoring and detection, along with security controls to implement critical policies that enforce proper API behavior and protect them from attacks. All of this is provided via a centralized platform for visibility and policy management across diverse IT environments.