Saving Millions with API Governance

Alexander the Great didn’t conquer half the known world with brute force—he did it with a standardized, highly trained army that moved as one. His phalanx formation could absorb chaos, adapt instantly, and never lose shape. Every soldier knew their role and the bigger picture.

He didn’t just win battles—he cracked the code on military governance. The result? The largest empire the ancient world had ever seen.

Fast forward to today: companies dominating the API space are doing the same. APIs have become the foundational language of modern software—the language of the future. By standardizing API design, security, and deployment, they move faster, break less, and scale smarter.

Think Stripe, Uber, Twilio, and Amazon MWS. Want to rule your domain? Start with strong API governance.

"As an architect or engineering lead, you need to understand the consequences of not having governance—no standards, no process—and project the long-term issues that may arise."

— Emmanuel Paraskakis, API Product Management Consultant

Saving Millions of Hours by Automating API Governance

Problem

In conversations with large enterprises and API thought leaders, one theme keeps coming up for 2025: governance. The larger the API team, the more complex the challenge. Many stakeholders struggle to assess the maturity of their API teams or the APIs themselves. There’s no clear, easy way to get a holistic view.

How enterprise companies are trying to solve it

You can listen to some of our conversations about API Governance with API thought leaders from our webinar series. Companies are approaching this challenge in different ways. The first step is having a Governance Program or Initiative. 

We’ve seen a few common approaches to tackling the governance challenge:

• Splitting into smaller teams to improve communication and control. But as the API landscape grows, cross-team visibility becomes an issue. Many teams end up unaware of what others are building, leading to overlap, missed opportunities, or inconsistencies.
• Creating internal documentation and standards to guide development. While enforcement remains tough, especially at scale. Some organizations that invest in clear rules tend to avoid major pitfalls, like shipping unoptimized or insecure APIs to production. 

WSO2 points out in their article that when multiple teams develop APIs independently, inconsistencies in design, data formats, and documentation can create challenges for integration and collaboration.

Solution

Governance Program - Ownership - Maturity Model - Reviews

1. Tackling API governance starts with putting a real structure in place. That means launching a Governance Program with clear ownership—assigning specific teams or roles to oversee API standards, security, and consistency. 
2. From there, define a baseline maturity model: What does a well-governed API look like at your company? Then, put tooling in place to track adoption, flag non-compliant APIs, and automate enforcement where possible. 
3. Set up regular reviews, encourage documentation as part of the dev process, and create feedback loops between teams to keep everyone aligned. The most effective teams treat governance not as a one-off project, but as an operational layer baked into every stage of the API lifecycle.

Saving Yourself from Millions of Security Headaches with API Governance

Problem

API Security remains one of the most critical and most vulnerable aspects of API development. In large organizations, it's not uncommon for APIs to go live without proper authentication, encryption, or access control. 

With dozens (or hundreds) of teams deploying APIs independently, it's nearly impossible to manually monitor them all for misconfigurations, outdated dependencies, or insecure patterns. One weak API can become an open door to your entire system.

How enterprise companies are trying to solve it

Security-conscious organizations are introducing security gates into the API lifecycle, automated checks during CI/CD pipelines to block insecure deployments. Others rely on manual security reviews, but these don’t scale well. 

A growing number are using API gateways and centralized policy engines to enforce security standards globally. But many still struggle to gain visibility into all their APIs, especially shadow APIs running under the radar.

“APIs are a primary attack vector. Lack of visibility and inconsistent security practices across teams make it difficult to enforce policies—especially in large organizations.”

— OWASP API Security Top 10 (2023)

Solution

Security policies - Governance Tools - Regular Reviews

An effective API governance strategy builds security into every phase of the lifecycle.

1.  Start with a baseline set of security policies: required authentication, rate limiting, encryption, and access scopes. 
2. Use governance tools to automatically scan and enforce these policies across your entire API catalog. Make security testing part of the CI/CD pipeline, and track compliance in dashboards accessible to both engineering and security teams. 
3. Combine this with regular reviews of API usage and exposure, and you’ll dramatically reduce your risk surface without slowing down your teams.

"The communication builds upon the policies you define for your governance and helps your teams make day-to-day decisions on API design, management, monitoring, tooling, and more."

— James Higginbotham, API Strategy Consultant & Founder, LaunchAny

Saving Millions of Dollars with API Governance

Problem

Poorly governed APIs can cost enterprises millions through outages, duplicated work, inefficient scaling, or wasted engineering time. Teams often unknowingly build redundant APIs, overpay for unused infrastructure, or spend time troubleshooting avoidable issues. Lack of visibility and inconsistent standards are at the root of this inefficiency.

How enterprise companies are trying to solve it

Many companies are investing in API catalogs or developer portals to give teams visibility into what's already built. Others are centralizing API design and review processes to reduce duplication. Some are introducing cost observability tools to track API usage and infrastructure spend. But without governance, these efforts are fragmented and hard to scale.

“APIs can be expensive to operate. Without governance around versioning, usage, and retirement, infrastructure and operational costs can quickly spiral out of control.”

— Gartner API Management Hype Cycle (2023)

Solution

Standardize - Automate - Implement Tooling

Strong API governance helps companies reduce costs by creating consistency, visibility, and reuse. 

1. Standardize how APIs are designed, named, documented, and versioned to avoid duplication.
2. Automate the detection of unused or inefficient APIs and archive them. 
3. Implement tooling that ties API usage to cost metrics, helping teams understand which APIs are over- or underutilized. Ultimately, API governance turns chaos into clarity, and that clarity translates directly into savings.

Consequences: What Happens When You Don’t Have a Governance Program in Place?

Security leaks as a direct result of poor governance

Millions of dollars have been lost and even been fined to companies because of major security breaches. We have written several blogs about major security breaches in the past year.

On February 26, 2025, Slack experienced a major outage that disrupted thousands of users—traced back to API failures stemming from database shard issues. It’s a clear reminder of why robust API governance and intelligence are essential.

With the right governance in place—tracking dependencies, monitoring API health, and enforcing standards—issues like this can be caught early, long before they lead to downtime. This is exactly where an API Intelligence Platform comes into play, offering a connected view of your entire API landscape.

The Postman data breach, which exposed over 30,000 APIs, revealed serious cracks in API management, ranging from misconfigured permissions to weak secrets handling.

These vulnerabilities weren’t just technical oversights—they were symptoms of missing or ineffective API governance. Without clear policies, automated checks, and visibility across teams, risks like these go unnoticed until it's too late.

In December 2024, Volkswagen Group suffered a major data breach due to a misconfigured API, exposing sensitive data from nearly 800,000 electric vehicle (EV) drivers.

At the heart of the issue was a lack of visibility and enforcement around API configuration and access controls. This incident underscores the critical role of API governance in securing modern systems.

There are many more examples you can read about our Treblle Blog:

• Lessons in API Security: DocuSign’s API Abuse
• Dotpe API Breach: How It Exposed Sensitive Data & How Treblle Could Have Prevented It
• $16 Million Lesson in API Security: FCC Fines TracFone for Major Consumer Data Breach
• Unauthenticated API endpoint can cost you Millions! Ask Twilio

It’s a reminder that when teams build APIs in silos, inconsistencies in design and documentation can slip through the cracks—introducing risks we break down in our guide to avoiding API breach pitfalls.

Bad developer experience

A lack of API governance doesn’t just impact security and cost Iit directly affects your developers. Without standardized guidelines, tooling, and processes, developers are left navigating inconsistent naming conventions, unclear documentation, and surprise breaking changes.

This leads to confusion, slowdowns, and frustration across teams. Developers end up spending more time figuring out how to integrate with internal APIs or worse, they rebuild existing ones from scratch. The result? Slower velocity, increased onboarding time, and a general drop in engineering morale.

Good governance flips this on its head. When APIs are discoverable, consistent, and well-documented, developers can focus on solving real problems, not untangling infrastructure. This is one of the strongest arguments for adopting an API-first approach to development.

Governance isn’t red tape! It should be looked at as an accelerator for a better developer experience.

API Churn

When APIs break, lag, or don’t meet expectations, it’s not just developers who suffer, users do too. Whether it's internal teams relying on APIs for core functionality or external partners building on top of your platform, unreliable or unpredictable APIs lead to lost trust.

"Over 50% of API consumers abandon integration efforts due to inconsistent or unstable API behavior."****

— SmartBear API Report** **

Trust erosion often results in churn: users abandoning your platform, partners reducing integrations, and internal teams choosing to build their own solutions rather than reuse what’s already there. And churn comes with real costs: lost revenue, increased support burden, and slower innovation.

By enforcing governance, companies ensure that APIs are reliable, performant, and consistent, keeping teams and users engaged, productive, and loyal.

Is there a Simple Solution to API Governance?

Trying to slove API Governance is no easy task, so many organizations are looking for ways to solve their own unique problems. You can certainly try to do it through multiple steps, firstone being having a Governance Program or Initiative as described above.  For a deeper dive into how companies are tackling this, check out our breakdown of API governance best practices.

But could you possibly, somehow, get a phalanx of your own, so that you could dominate just as Alexander the Great once did?

What if we told you you coul automate 90% of it and have all your APIs scored around your specific ruleset that you can programmatically enforce, while all data is connected in an API catalog, while also enabling API discovery making critical APIs easily accessible to teams that specifically need them.

How?

We’ve been solving this for multiple large organizations companies such as JP Morgan, National Netherlands (NN), Astra Zeneca, Axis Bank and more. Book a demo with our technical API experts and we can show you exactly what worked for them! 

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Ready to take control of your APIs before the next breach hits? See how Treblle can help you automate governance, improve visibility, and secure every stage of the API lifecycle.

Book a Demo with Treblle