What is API governance?
API governance refers to the policies, standards, and processes that guide how APIs are built, managed, and secured. Since APIs are what hold IT environments together and drive high cloud performance, businesses should make API governance a top priority. The high-level goals? Consistency, compliance, and observability.
In the cloud, poor API governance translates directly to security posture risks: undocumented shadow APIs, excessive exposure of sensitive data, and misconfigured authentication. Left unchecked, these risks lead to data breaches and compliance failures—faster than teams can respond.
Since APIs are in vogue as attack vectors, cloud security teams must mitigate and remediate risks like misconfigurations, excessive exposure, and attack paths before adversaries exploit them. In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at why API governance is especially crucial in the cloud. We’ll also provide an actionable guide to setting up a strong API governance program and detailed information on key metrics and challenges that you need to know about. Let’s get started.
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Why API governance matters more in the cloud
The speed of the cloud is a double-edged sword: As cloud environments proliferate and evolve, it gets harder to identify and remediate API security risks. Here are some common API risks that mushroom in cloud environments:
Excessive Data Exposure: APIs can expose sensitive fields or internal metadata when responses aren’t properly scoped, leading to data leakage in production environments.
Misconfiguration: API endpoints deployed with over-permissive access, unpatched systems, or insecure defaults become internet-exposed and vulnerable to exploitation.
BOLA (Broken Object-Level Authorization): When APIs lack object-level authorization, attackers can manipulate object identifiers to access resources they shouldn’t.
Incomplete Inventory: Without full API discovery, organizations lose visibility into cloud APIs, enabling shadow APIs and blind spots in governance.
Unsafe API Consumption: Trusting third-party APIs without vetting their security posture introduces hidden exposure paths to external attack vectors.
The consequences of inadequate API governance
In the cloud, APIs often become the primary interface to business logic and sensitive data. As a result, they’re often the target of attacks and the reason behind performance failures.
In highly distributed and ephemeral cloud environments, the lack of strong API governance can lead to major problems:
Shadow APIs: When API management gets out of hand, it can result in unsecured and untracked endpoints. Adversaries can exploit these endpoints to infiltrate enterprise clouds or exfiltrate sensitive data.
Inconsistent authentication practices: While some APIs may have strong authentication and authorization controls (like access tokens) to facilitate access for legitimate users, others may have misconfigured controls. Misconfigured controls contribute to a weaker API security posture and provide unauthorized users with access.
Exposure of internal services and sensitive data: When APIs are compromised, the resources that they act as an intermediary for are also compromised. This may include business-critical services and PHI and PII, increasing the possibility of major security and compliance disasters.
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Core components of API governance
While design standards are foundational, security posture is enforced at runtime—meaning governance doesn’t stop at design, it must continue through deployment and ongoing monitoring.
To mitigate the risks we’ve discussed and ensure security, reliability, and auditability across your API estate, focus on the three core components of API governance:
API standards and design guidelines
Establishing a standardized set of practices and protocols around API design is central to strong API governance. In fact, it’s the only way to consistently define, manage, and enforce APIs in fast-growing cloud environments.
Action items:
Establish and enforce consistent naming, versioning, and documentation formats and protocols.
Verify that APIs strictly adhere to OpenAPI/Swagger specifications to guarantee consistent design, validation, and interoperability.
Security policies
Every API governance program needs strong security baselines to keep APIs safe from internal vulnerabilities and external attacks.
Action items:
Set up authentication and authorization protocols, including OAuth 2.0 and JWT.
Introduce measures like rate limiting, throttling, and DoS protection to prevent attacks.
Establish stringent data handling standards, especially for sensitive information like PII and PCI.
Lifecycle visibility
Without visibility across the entire API lifecycle, it’s impossible to mitigate API security threats and keep things in line with organizational guidelines.
Action items:
Set up an inventory of every single API across your IT environments to improve management and discoverability.
Use an agentless API security/scanning tool to gain comprehensive visibility into ownership, hosting resources, and public exposures.
Rely on agentless API discovery to maintain posture visibility, correlating APIs to the cloud resources and identities that own and expose them.
Monitoring and enforcement
Designing an API governance strategy is one half of the puzzle; enforcement is the other. For successful enforcement, continuously monitor APIs across your cloud setup to make sure you’re sticking to your organization’s rules.
Action items:
Ensure runtime policy enforcement.
Set up alerts for policy violations or misconfigurations.
Maintain reporting and audit trails for compliance.
Continuous enforcement transforms governance from static documentation into active posture management, reducing blind spots across fast-changing cloud environments.
Setting up API governance in cloud-native environments
Now that we’re on the same page about why API governance is different in the cloud, it should be pretty clear that API governance can’t be a static, manual checklist. It needs to be programmatically enforced and automated—and deeply embedded across cloud environments.
Here are some API security best practices for effective cloud governance:
Enforce standards across CI/CD pipelines: Introduce linting specifications and tools into CI/CD pipelines, as well as standards for checking required authentications.
Use API gateways and service meshes: Leverage these software layers to standardize security controls across every single API in your cloud environment.
Continuously discover cloud APIs: Use automation-driven tools to find and inventory APIs from all over your cloud architecture, including shadow APIs.
Focus on context and correlation: Correlate API metadata with cloud workload context to gain an understanding of the most pressing risks that affect your organization.
Key metrics for API governance
How do you know if your API governance program is actually effective? It’s simple. Track these metrics:
Percentage of APIs with proper authentication: Measures how many APIs in your cloud have the strongest authentication controls in place
Percentage of APIs exposing sensitive data: Identifies how many APIs are putting PHI, PII, and PCI at risk
Number of undocumented (shadow) APIs: Pinpoints how many APIs fall out of the stewardship of cloud security and IT teams
Number of APIs exposed publicly without justification: Identifies internet-facing APIs that have no business or functional justification
MTTR for addressing API security issues: Evaluates how quickly API vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and incidents are identified and mitigated
API ownership coverage: Demonstrates how many APIs have clearly delineated owners and how many don’t
Challenges to effective API governance
As we’ve seen, establishing API governance in the cloud isn’t always straightforward. Here are some common challenges:
API sprawl: In high-octane environments, new cloud resources are often commissioned without official approval. As a result, APIs that connect those resources can go undocumented and untracked. These untracked shadow APIs may have compliance or security issues that security teams aren’t aware of.
Lack of consistent security practices: Different teams use different authentication schemes. Some may not use any. This inconsistency in API security creates vulnerabilities and gaps that threat actors can potentially exploit.
Limited visibility: The prerequisite for effective API governance is comprehensive cloud visibility, which is not always guaranteed. Cloud teams often can’t see where APIs are deployed, what data they expose, or who owns them.
Manual policy enforcement: You can define the strongest API governance policies, but if they’re being enforced manually, there’s a higher risk of human error, blind spots, and API misconfigurations.
While these challenges are serious, it’s not all doom and gloom. All you need to mitigate these API and application security risks and drive API governance? Powerful cloud-native API security tools and capabilities—which brings us to Wiz.
How Wiz supports API governance
Wiz provides the building blocks for modern API governance, helping organizations move beyond documentation to real enforcement. The Wiz Dynamic Scanner provides comprehensive API visibility and helps create a topology of your APIs, data sources, and services. Wiz also conducts multi-layer cloud assessments to contextualize, correlate, and triage API security issues.
With Wiz, you can:
Automatically discover all API endpoints (even undocumented ones)
Monitor for auth misconfigurations, sensitive data exposure, and public access
Understand the hosting context and ownership of each API
Track governance metrics, like schema coverage, authentication consistency, and API sprawl
By combining runtime telemetry with deep cloud context, Wiz helps teams govern their APIs effectively so that they stay secure, compliant, and under control.
Ready to see for yourself? Get a demo today to learn how Wiz can take your API governance program to the next level.
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