Rein in API sprawl with F5 and Google Cloud

Beth McElroySr. Alliances Manager

Fueled by modern application architectures and AI solutions, today’s digital businesses are faced with constantly expanding API connectivity. Organizations likely interact with hundreds of APIs daily—and more are being added all the time.

As API endpoints continue to pile up, IT departments are struggling to keep pace. According to the F5 2025 State of Application Strategy Report, 58% of organizations are currently experiencing API sprawl. And by 2030, it’s expected that 2 billion APIs will be in play.

The risks of unseen and unmanaged integrations

This constant influx of new API endpoints, combined with fragmented approaches to management, can lead to shadow APIs: unidentified connections in the application landscape that aren’t managed or secured.

Shadow APIs represent a vulnerability that attackers are eager to exploit. And when they succeed, it can lead to serious ramifications for your business, such as exposure of sensitive information or penalties for noncompliance. Damage to brand reputation and intellectual property theft are other risks presented by the presence of shadow APIs, as are service outages and revenue loss.

Complicating matters, traditional API protections aren’t designed to keep up with the new complexity and scale being introduced by AI. Massive proliferation, complex authentication patterns, variable high-volume traffic, and buried dependencies all combine to make it challenging for IT departments to safeguard their endpoints across distributed environments.

Protect and manage all your API connections

Together, F5 and Google Cloud can help you discover, secure, and manage your APIs through integrated solutions that combine Google Cloud's AI-optimized infrastructure and security capabilities with advanced API discovery and protection in the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). Using F5 and Google Cloud technologies, you canscan traffic to discover APIs in running applications and inspect source code to find risks before deployment. You can even integrate with platforms such as GitHub to identify APIs early in the development lifecycle.

For protection against both AI-specific and traditional threats, F5 provides automation capabilities that enable real-time threat response. You can apply continuous machine learning to identify and block suspicious behavior, while also applying rate limiting to mitigate unbounded consumption and layer 7 DoS attacks against APIs and applications. Strong authentication and access control mechanisms ensure that only authorized users and systems can access AI models and sensitive data, and granular OpenAPI Specification (OAS) enforcement validates all API requests against defined schemas, preventing malformed requests from reaching your AI models.

Plus, unified observability provides actionable insights across all your environments. F5 collects global API metrics into a centralized interface that integrates seamlessly with Google Cloud’s observability suite and security information and event management (SIEM) tools for real-time viewing, alerting, and analysis. The ultimate result is streamlined management and comprehensive visibility that makes it easier for your team to tame API sprawl.

Secure AI investments while maintaining agility

F5 and Google Cloud deliver the automated, simplified, and centralized API security that your organization needs to:

• Accelerate AI innovation with reduced security friction.
• Optimize costs through intelligent resource management.
• Reduce risks via improved visibility and dynamic security.
• Enhance operational efficiency with unified management and observability.

Together, F5 and Google Cloud technologies provide broad security coverage, leveraging Google Cloud’s native tooling to manage APIs within Google Cloud infrastructure and F5 solutions to identify APIs across on-premises, multicloud, and third-party environments.

F5 security events integrate with Google Cloud Security Command Center and Google Security Operations for a holistic view that enables faster detection and response to threats. Native OpenTelemetry support in the F5 solutions means logs flow seamlessly to Google Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, and BigQuery for unified observability.

Ready to secure your APIs and AI applications?

As your organization continues to pursue AI initiatives, F5 and Google Cloud are ready to help you protect your valuable investments from emerging threats with comprehensive API security. Take advantage of our combined capabilities for API discovery, management, and protection to ensure your organization is secure as you seek to deliver innovative, AI-enhanced application experiences.

Click here to learn more about F5 and Google Cloud.

About the Author

Beth McElroySr. Alliances Manager

More blogs by Beth McElroy