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The new offering aims to make governance simple and consistent even across multiple APIs

MuleSoft this week announced the availability of Universal API Management (UAPIM) on its Anypoint Platform. The offering is part of a group of new and existing products geared at providing MuleSoft customers with a single control plane to enable visibility, flexible management, and governance at scale.

Varun Krovvidi, Product Marketing Manager at MuleSoft, detailed the new Anypoint features in a blog post. “API governance is often accompanied with a sense of burden as development teams visualize process overheads, review cycles, and long running negotiations,” he wrote.

“On the other hand, compliance issues with APIs are quickly emerging as a top concern for most software engineering leaders.”

Indeed, according to Gartner, by 2025, fewer than 50% of enterprise APIs. Krovvidi says this is due to explosive growth of APIs surpassing the in-built security capabilities of most API management tools. Every unmanaged and unsecured API is a potential vulnerability that could create a multimillion dollar security incident or a security breach headline, he warns.

Governance does not have to be a necessary evil

MuleSoft is introducing Anypoint API Governance to help IT teams maintain consistent quality and adhere to internal standards and industry regulations across all APIs without adding overheads and review cycles to development teams. “Our vision with this product is to shift left with governance and to make it frictionless for developers to adopt the governance standards,” Krovvidi states.

Design-time governance is growing as a major concern, he adds. “With exponential adoption of APIs across most organizations, IT leaders need to ensure each specification that involves sensitive information adheres to government regulations, industry standards, or internal best practices to avoid compliance incidents or inefficiencies.”

Simplicity through a single control pane

Using Anypoint API Governance, central IT teams can leverage out-of-the-box rulesets provided by MuleSoft or create custom rulesets to avoid managing standards in siloed documents. A ruleset is a collection of rules that can be applied over the metadata extracted from any REST API definition. These rules are extensible and based on open standards (W3C, OPA), Krovvidi says.

With the updated API Manager, Anypoint Platform provides a single control plane to extend the control and security policies to every service in your environment. Krovvidi asserts that “this creates consistency in how service traffic is maintained and simplicity for IT teams in governing all services from a single control plane.”

Also read: MuleSoft updates Anypoint Platform with DataGraph.