API governance refers to the rules, policies, and standards that control how APIs are designed, developed, and managed. It is important because it ensures API security, consistency, and compliance across the organization. Effective API governance allows businesses to scale their API programs while maintaining high standards for functionality and security.
API governance refers to the processes and controls implemented to manage, monitor, and maintain APIs (application programming interfaces). It involves defining standards, policies, and guidelines for API design, development, deployment, and usage. The goal of API governance is to ensure consistency, security, scalability, and reliability across all APIs.
As APIs have become more common in enterprise architecture, there’s been a push for IT departments to implement API governance measures. This article examines API governance. It looks at how API governance works, along with its benefits, challenges, and best practices.
What is API governance? The short answer is that it’s a set of rules and practices that control how APIs are used — with the goal of ensuring security and compliance. A deeper answer is in order, however, if you want to understand why API governance is important and why the leaders of a corporation are insisting on it.
API governance is a subset of IT governance, which is a subset of corporate governance. The essence of corporate governance is that the owners of a business, the shareholders, want to make sure that their agents, the executives, have clear and sensible rules for how they run that business. Corporate governance is the answer to the shareholder’s question, “What are you doing with my money?”
A corporation’s executives are custodians of the shareholder’s property. They need to demonstrate that they are being prudent with those assets. This is why, for example, a corporation usually has a rule that the board must approve certain investments, with the goal of minimizing risk to shareholder assets.
IT governance flows from this principle. It’s a formal framework that’s designed to ensure that IT investments support a corporation’s objectives while keeping risk to a minimum. In some cases, IT governance must adhere to government regulations like the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX).
API governance is part of this bigger picture. It is the practice of making all APIs subject to a common set of rules, standards, and security policies. This usually involves setting up standardized conventions for documentation as well as security mechanisms. For example, an API governance rule might specify that APIs need to use a common data model. There will be agreed-upon rules for versioning, integration, deprecating, and so forth, along with security policies like the use of OAuth and encryption in transit.
Benefits of API governance
API governance, assuming it is consistently and properly implemented, enables an organization to create, update and manage all APIs throughout their lifecycles. The standardization of development, documentation, version control, and security makes this possible. If there is a question about any of these focus areas, governance rules eliminate distracting debate and contradictory actions that impair the effectiveness and security of the API portfolio. The assumption is that all relevant stakeholders have come together to make decisions about governance collectively.
At a higher level, the benefits of API governance are about the realization of business strategies. For example, if a company’s competitive strategy involves integrating applications with a supply chain partner, then API governance is essential to making this strategy work as a practical reality.
Going further, API governance is a key success factor in adopting an “API first” strategy, wherein APIs are the basis for product creation. The assumption is that applications are going to be interacting with APIs one way or another. APIs are thus critical for achieving the right business outcomes and should “come first.” In an API-first organization, all stakeholders, from developers to designers and product managers, are aware of APIs even before they are created. Without API governance, this is a difficult goal to attain.
Challenges to API governance
API governance is not always easy. The same could be said for corporate and IT governance. Rules are not sexy, important as they may be. One challenge that organizations run into with API governance has to do with problems of scalability. It can be stressful to make API governance operative across an increasing number of diverse teams, from DevOps to security, IT infrastructure management, and so forth.
Difficulties with API governance also tend to arise when an application is changing or expanding its scope. Adding new API clients from different partners, for example, can make applying governance rules inconvenient — and tempt people to ignore them. But that’s exactly when they’re needed most. Without the rules and policies, APIs start to break, which is precisely what you don’t want to have happening as business is on a growth trajectory.
API governance best practices
API professionals have developed a number of API governance best practices over the years. These vary from place to place, but in general, the optimal approach to API governance will include the following:
- Setting up a centralized set of API governance rules that apply organization-wide. These may include coding standards like OpenAPI as well as consistent metadata fields to make APIs discoverable and reusable.
- Allowing exceptions to rules when necessary. It’s inevitable that on certain occasions the rules won’t work. The governance model should be flexible enough to handle such cases.
- Automating API governance checks. Making self-service API governance possible is empowering and effective for people who make and use APIs. It makes everyone more productive and reduces the likelihood of stakeholders working around governance rules.
- Establishing an information model for planning, designing, and building APIs. Known as a “canonical model” under the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm, a unified model with approved model objects and resources is able to standardize enterprise information in predetermined structures. This helps make APIs governable.
- Applying governance across the full API lifecycle — through the phases of plan, design, build, test, and run. This helps with governance by ensuring that APIs will be standardized and reliable wherever they are in the lifecycle.
- Implementing rigorous API versioning. Version control is where API governance can break down. Governance rules need to apply to all versions of an API, and they need to be documented. Determining if a new API is backward compatible is a related process.
- Making sure that API governance rules are met before deploying an API. It’s not wise to deploy an ungoverned API. Keeping up with API governance rules means having APIs that are compliant, consistent, and complete.
API governance and API management
Effective API governance is closely intertwined with API management. While API governance sets the rules and policies for API design, development, and security, API management is the implementation of those rules. API management platforms provide the tools necessary to monitor API performance, security, and versioning.
These platforms ensure that APIs adhere to governance standards across the organization, promoting scalability and consistency. Through centralized control, teams can oversee the entire API ecosystem, ensuring that each API aligns with compliance, security protocols, and business objectives. Additionally, API management tools can enforce access control and monitor API usage, further enhancing governance efforts by tracking and validating API behavior across different departments.
Automation in API governance
Automation is critical for maintaining effective API governance, especially as organizations scale their API development efforts. Manual enforcement of governance rules can be inefficient and error-prone, leading to inconsistencies in how APIs are developed, tested, and deployed. Automating API governance processes allows organizations to maintain high standards of API quality without slowing down innovation.
Through automated checks and validations, APIs can be scanned for compliance with governance rules, including correct authentication, security measures, and data formats. Automated validation ensures that APIs meet organizational standards before deployment, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities or compliance failures. This increases confidence in the functionality and security of APIs while improving the overall developer experience.
API governance and security controls
One of the primary functions of API governance is to enhance API security by defining strict security controls for how APIs should be built, accessed, and managed. With governance in place, organizations can enforce consistent authentication methods, such as OAuth 2.0, across all APIs, minimizing risks associated with unauthorized access. In addition, API gateways play a crucial role in securing the API landscape by acting as a barrier between internal systems and external consumers, enforcing access control policies, and managing API traffic.
Governance also ensures that APIs are regularly updated to address new security threats. By incorporating security best practices from OWASP and continuously validating APIs against known vulnerabilities, organizations can reduce their attack surface and prevent cyberattacks that target API endpoints.
Conclusion
API governance is essential for success with APIs, and by extension, the far bigger strategic vision they represent — broad, flexible integration between diverse technologies and the ability to realize digital transformation. Yet API governance is not always so simple to execute. Being successful requires following best practices and working on the organizational side of the equation. API governance may be about rules, but making it work takes people coming together to agree on how they are going to do things. As these factors coalesce, effective, consistent API governance can become a reality.
Frequently Asked Questions
API governance sets the standards and rules for how APIs should be developed and used, while API management involves the tools and platforms that enforce these rules. Together, they ensure that APIs are secure, reliable, and consistent across the organization, helping teams monitor API performance, versioning, and security.
Automation in API governance helps streamline the enforcement of governance rules, reducing manual efforts and human error. By automating checks for API compliance, authentication methods, and data validation, organizations can ensure that all APIs meet established standards before they are deployed, improving both security and developer experience.
API governance enforces security measures such as access control, encryption, and authentication protocols like OAuth 2.0. By setting consistent security policies, organizations can protect APIs from unauthorized access, data breaches, and other cyberattacks. API gateways and automated security checks also contribute to robust API security.
API governance improves API quality by enforcing best practices for design, documentation, testing, and security. With governance in place, APIs are more likely to be reliable, secure, and scalable, ensuring that they meet the needs of the business and the expectations of developers and end users.
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