Multiple API Gateways: Why does it happen and what are the challenges?

Many organizations have multiple API Gateways in place. This can complicate the goal of creating an organization-wide approach for managing and using APIs. However, in most cases, the reasons for this are rather straightforward and are simply a result of how large organizations evolve over time.

Multiple API Gateways

Axway has conducted a survey among large organizations, asking them for reasons why they have multiple API Gateways, and for challenges that they see arising from this situation. This survey is available as a white paper and also is presented in a webinar.

Survey

The survey presents six reasons and four challenges. Knowing these reasons and challenges helps organizations to understand what situations typically may lead to the adoption of multiple API Gateways, and it also helps with understanding what challenges may emerge, even if they are not yet an issue.

In this brief interview with Jana Frejova, co-author of the white paper, we look at two examples of reasons (different management of external/internal APIs, and hybrid or cloud deployments) and two examples of challenges (API consumption visibility, and governance and security). The following video provides a brief introduction about the motivation for the study and highlights some of the results.

If you’re interested in the complete survey, here are the resources presenting the full results:

• Axway white paper “API gateways: The more, the merrier?”
• Axway webinar “Unified API and Integration Governance”