Hi everyone! APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are the building blocks for communicating and evolving the different parts of today’s systems. The decentralized approach of modern API development means that individual teams and developers are often involved in the explosion of APIs to get features out fast. But they may be inadvertently creating new APIs that merely duplicate existing functionality or create inconsistencies. Assume you work for a company that is building a banking application using microservices. Here, different teams such as payment, account and notification build their own APIs to deliver the features they own. For instance, the notification team builds an API to send notifications when a payment is successful, while the payment team builds an API to perform transactions. The accounts team, however, is building a similar payment notification API without knowledge of a pre-existing one. API coordination and documentation are not required. Many APIs do the same thing but in slightly different ways. Some will have different naming conventions, some will have no authentication, some will be simply disorganized. This lack of control and visibility makes it difficult to find or set up the best service for developers, and also leads to inefficiencies and higher costs for the company. This is known as API sprawl. In this post I’ll explore what API sprawl is, what causes it, why it matters and how it impacts businesses.
Understanding the API Explosion API Sprawl
API sprawl is the uncontrolled proliferation of APIs within an enterprise. This is typical when different business units or teams build their own APIs for their own needs, often with little or no oversight/governance. In the early 2000s, APIs were heralded as a game-changer for companies making the leap to the online world, a strategic way to enable communication between disparate pieces of software. APIs made integration of third party services into products easier improving functionality without needing to build new features from scratch. The core value proposition for APIs was their ability to allow interoperability and to enable smooth data exchange.
Statistics on API Sprawl: How Serious Is It?
The report finds that 48% of businesses cite API sprawl as their biggest headache. It’s a big pain for businesses and a common problem across many different sectors and industries.
39% of businesses are struggling to maintain an accurate API inventory. Lack of visibility and documentation around APIs only exacerbates the problem and makes it harder to manage the inventory. Organizations need to have full visibility of their API ecosystem to be able to properly assess risk, understand dependencies and meet internal and external regulatory requirements. 30% of organizations also say it’s hard to manage third-party access to APIs. Third-party APIs are great for adding functionality and allowing integration with external services but it can be hard to keep security and access permissions in check. These statistics underscore the vital importance for organizations to strike the right balance with third party integrations so as not to jeopardize security and control of their online environment. They also highlight the significance of organizations fighting against API sprawl and what happens if they don’t.
Why is API Sprawl On the Rise?
API sprawl is on the rise today for a number of interconnected reasons, including: Microservices architectures mean that a single application may depend on many different services, each with their own endpoints. Multicloud and hybrid architectures use APIs to address geographic and vendor complexity. DevOps approaches focusing on speed of shipping often result in new APIs being deployed before anyone has a chance to find out if they already exist. Decentralized development sees individual business departments creating their own technology stacks and APIs.
Artificial intelligence is compounding the problem, as every model, agent and AI-powered process requires access to company data through multiple APIs. Companies using generative AI apps manage nearly five times as many APIs as those that don’t.
The Business Impact of API Sprawl
The growing impact of API sprawl presents a number of challenges for the entire organization.
The Financial Impact of API Sprawl
The business impact can take a toll on budgets. API sprawl is, however, closely tied to other root causes.
The temptation is to build a new API when teams cannot quickly discover if one already exists to support a given function. But this adds time to development and maintenance. The impact of redundant services, expected to cost US businesses nearly $600 billion per year across all industries, can be the result of such duplicated effort. Next is the cost of monitoring the fractured estate. The expense of the monitoring and documentation tools goes up as more endpoints and environments need to be covered.
IDC reports that 40% of companies use multiple gateways and 42% use multiple API management solutions. With individual internal buyers supporting individual suppliers, and legacy platforms that cannot be discarded, companies continue to add more API management tools instead of consolidating them. This results in multi-gateway, multi-vendor solutions that add yet another layer of cost to API sprawl, with each limited solution having its own operational learning curves, integration costs, and licensing fees.
Impact on Operations and Productivity
API sprawl also has unquantifiable negative effects on productivity, with only 10 to 20% of APIs reportedly well documented and easily reused. Engineers will spend hours, even days trying to find existing APIs, work through inconsistencies or lack of documentation, and find disconnected management consoles before throwing up their hands and documenting something new. Badly mapped API dependencies lead to delays in integration and testing frequencies that lead to lost revenue. A McKinsey study shows that a product that is six months late could lose about a third of its potential profit over a five-year period. Developers tend to disengage when they spend their days and nights fixing integration problems, and reconstructing functionality that already exists somewhere. After factoring in hiring, onboarding and ramp-up time, a corporation can lose between 90% and 200% of a talented engineer’s annual compensation due to turnover. Onboarding into a company plagued by API sprawl depends on the savvy of engineers that have been there for a long time and remember why a certain API was set up the way it was years ago. Valuable knowledge is lost when employees retire or move on to other jobs. Meanwhile a new hire can quickly start adding value to a well-run company by browsing a centralized catalog and clear documentation.
Risks to Security and Compliance
Attackers can exploit the fact that many APIs lack sufficient encryption, authentication and control over access. The average cost of a single data breach is estimated to be over $4.4 million, and transactional systems that employ undocumented APIs are the target of about 31% of assaults. Two-thirds of consumers will lose faith in a company following a breach if trust is compromised. An estimated $100 billion will be lost annually in 2026 as a result of a poorly managed interface.
API Sprawl's Security Risks
Attackers can exploit the fact that many APIs are not sufficiently encrypted, authenticated or have the right controls over access. The average cost of a single data breach is estimated to be around $4.4 million and about 31% of attacks are directed at transactional systems that include undocumented APIs. After a breach, two-thirds of consumers will lose confidence in a business. A badly managed interface is projected to cause losses of $100 billion in 2026 each year. APIs are key for application and service integration and play a significant role in today’s application development. An enterprise may face serious dangers from an improperly managed and secured API inventory. It might be difficult to establish uniform security rules throughout the company when redundant and duplicate APIs proliferate due to API sprawl. Furthermore, it may be challenging to recognise and address security risks due to the sheer volume of APIs.
Unauthorised access to sensitive data is one of the primary security issues of API sprawl. Unauthorised access to these API endpoints can lead to data breaches. Several APIs provide access to resources and data that are crucial for organisational operations. Moreover, API sprawl can lead to a challenge to properly secure these APIs and limit access to only those who are authorized. Another security challenge is the possibility of vulnerabilities in APIs. Vulnerabilities can easily slip through security tests while working with various APIs. Attackers may use API vulnerabilities to launch attacks against other parts of the company’s infrastructure or to gain access to private information or resources. Therefore, monetary losses, upkeep expenses, and harm to one’s reputation may occur.
How to Address API Sprawl?
A well-defined approach that considers ownership, visibility, governance and lifecycle management can help reduce API sprawl. Here are some ways to manage your APIs:
Gain Greater Visibility
If you can’t find all the APIs your teams are creating, you can’t effectively manage or reuse them. First, categorize all the APIs within your organization as external, internal, experimental or legacy, then make them all available through a single gateway. APIs that are well-documented and accessible are also easy to discover, which helps to minimize duplication and maximize reuse and onboarding of new hires.
Implement Governance
Governance is better viewed as giving teams just enough direction to keep things on the same page, rather than just stopping them. Define basic API standards for things like naming conventions, versioning, authentication, and data formats. Then, bake those standards into your developer workflows with linters, checklists, or CI/CD practices. When governance is baked into the team’s work, it’s a helpful part of the process, not a hindrance.
Giving Ownership
An API becomes technical debt the moment it is released if there is no one owning it. Each API should have a unique owner, normally the team that developed it, and that ownership should be visible in the internal API catalog. This will make it easy for others to report issues, request changes or see how long it is expected to be supported.
Controlling Sprawl
If left unchecked or unsynchronized, development, staging and production environments can easily become their own little mini-ecosystem of APIs. You might use different versions for different environments, forget to clean up the previous version or allow shadow APIs to be added to staging and never removed.
To manage this, you need to have procedures in place to trace each API from development to production, and ensure that naming conventions are consistent.
Responsible Monitoring, Auditing and Deprecating
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Start with monitoring use of the API, to see what endpoints are being used, and which are underused or slow. This gives you the data you need to identify serious hazards and decide what should be improved or rejected.