As your approach matures, you can move from ad-hoc, tactical API governance to a more structured, strategic approach. Doing so means you can use your API governance as a means of instilling confidence in your teams, defining your values as a business and gaining competitive advantage.
How? We show you in depth in The enterprise architect’s guide to universal API governance, but we can give you a quick rundown here too…
Governance maturity stages
People, processes and platforms lie at the heart of any mature API governance model. But maturity doesn’t happen overnight. It takes thought and hard work, as this example of a mature, automated governance model at Northwestern Mutual so ably demonstrates.
Broadly speaking, we can group API governance maturity into four main levels:
- Provisional (ad-hoc): This is characterized by individual developers managing APIs with minimal oversight, perhaps using personal tools to do so and with no centralized control. It presents a range of challenges, from lack of standardization and inconsistent security practices to difficulty in tracking API usage.
- Operational: Here, centralized teams and basic governance policies have been introduced, resulting in standardized security measures and initial documentation efforts. An example of this in action is a central team beginning to enforce token-based authentication across APIs.
- Scalable: This is where you have a mature governance framework with automated processes, encompassing integration with CI/CD pipelines, automated policy enforcement, and comprehensive API catalogs. Your API development follows templated paths with embedded governance checks.
- Optimizing: The highest level of API governance maturity, this is characterized by continuous improvement and innovation in governance practices. At this level, you benefit from advanced analytics, self-service dashboards for real-time governance insights, proactive security measures, and alignment of your API governance with your business goals.
Evolving your governance through these stages is essential for modern API ecosystems. With businesses operating hundreds or even thousands of APIs across multiple protocols and teams, and agentic AI weighing in to add to the complexity, centralized, mature governance is crucial for security, compliance, operational efficiency, cost effectiveness and so much more.
The role of people, processes, and platforms
Moving through the stages of API governance maturity, from a tactical approach to a more strategic one, means engaging your people thoughtfully. The more you engage your teams, the more they will want to follow your governance processes – not because you’ve mandated that they must, but because those processes make their working lives easier and more enjoyable. You can dive into more detail on engaging your teams in API governance here.
The key point to embrace is the breadth of those you need to engage: platform engineers, developers, security teams, and business leaders, at the very least. They will need to collaborate to define your governance policies, implement standards, and monitor API performance. They’ll also need to feed into your balance between governance requirements and developer autonomy.
In process terms, you’ll need to establish clear workflows, documentation standards, and feedback loops that span the entire API lifecycle, from design and development, through deployment, to monitoring, and eventually deprecation. This isn’t a once-and-done job, but something that you’ll need to review regularly, refining processes to maximize their efficiency and to adapt to your enterprise’s evolving needs – as well as to emerging technologies.
When it comes to your governance platform, you’ll need something that fits around your processes (not something that forces you to adapt your processes to fit the platform). A wide range of tools and frameworks support governance at scale, enabling automation, enforcing policies and ensuring compliance across the API lifecycle. Tyk’s universal API governance hub, for example, transforms API governance from a fragmented, post-deployment concern into a proactive, continuous, and scalable process across your teams and your business.
Building clarity into complex systems
Part of maturing your API governance means shifting from seeing it as a technical complexity to a business opportunity. Doing so involves ensuring your governance is easy to understand, follow, measure, and report on. This is what will keep it nimble as you scale.
Embracing open standards as you scale helps too. Open Policy Agent (OPA), for example, is an excellent way to codify standards and business requirements while governing disparate teams and systems.
Automation is also your friend. By automating your API governance, you can help ensure the reusability and future relevance of your APIs, while also supporting your developers to innovate (and removing the worry of them breaking your business).
The quest for strategic API governance
Moving to a more mature, strategic API governance model can deliver rewards across your business. Doing so is crucial to staying future-ready, particularly given the pace at which technology is evolving.
To explore scalable strategies for enforcing governance across teams and environments, and to see how an API governance toolkit helps drive structured governance outcomes, check out Tyk’s on-demand webinar: From chaos to confidence | Accelerating API governance maturity with Tyk. You can use the webinar as part of conversations within your enterprise around your current level of governance maturity and any areas for improvement. And, as you plan to advance through the governance maturity stages, remember that the Tyk team is here to help.
