What Is an Unmanaged API?

APIs serve as the connective layer across applications, data sources, automation, and third party integrations in modern enterprises. As organizations scale digital operations, APIs proliferate far faster than governance processes can keep up. This creates a class of APIs that are visible to the organization but not continuously governed or secured.

Gartner has identified that the pace of digital delivery and the shift to microservices and API centric architectures create significant governance challenges. Organizations routinely struggle to maintain an accurate view of their API estate, and documented inventories often fail to reflect what is running in production.

IBM research on enterprise security highlights APIs as common vectors in data exposure and misconfiguration incidents. The factor that distinguishes low risk APIs from high risk ones is not simply whether they are known, but whether they are subject to ongoing control and monitoring.

Industry reporting on API adoption indicates that many APIs are onboarded into management frameworks at launch but lose governance coverage over time. Teams may hand off responsibility, update tooling, or change execution paths without corresponding updates to security controls or policy enforcement.

In this context, an API can be known to the organization but unmanaged in terms of consistent governance and oversight. This distinction is fundamental to understanding risk in API driven systems.

What Is an Unmanaged API?

An unmanaged API is an application programming interface that an organization is aware of but is not subject to consistent governance, security policy enforcement, or monitoring throughout its lifecycle.

The defining characteristic of an unmanaged API is not invisibility. The API may be documented, registered, or historically onboarded into an API management platform. It becomes unmanaged when controls are incomplete, outdated, or no longer applied as the API evolves. Unmanaged APIs differ from undocumented or unknown endpoints. An undocumented endpoint may be entirely absent from inventories. An unmanaged API is known but not actively controlled. The distinction matters because awareness alone does not reduce risk.

An unmanaged API also differs from a shadow API. Shadow APIs are typically unknown or undiscovered. Unmanaged APIs sit in a narrower category where existence is acknowledged but governance has decayed.

Management, in this context, refers to active enforcement of authentication, authorization, monitoring, and policy alignment. When these elements are absent or inconsistent, the API operates without effective oversight.

How APIs Become Unmanaged

APIs most often become unmanaged through gradual change rather than through a single failure. Many APIs are initially onboarded into governance processes at launch. Over time, ownership may shift between teams, tooling may change, or security responsibilities may be reassigned. When these transitions occur without corresponding updates to controls, management coverage weakens.

Continuous delivery practices contribute to this condition. APIs evolve through incremental changes deployed via CI/CD pipelines. If governance checks are not embedded into these pipelines, changes can bypass review while the API remains listed as managed.

Temporary exceptions also play a role. Authentication bypasses, relaxed rate limits, or reduced logging may be introduced to address short term operational needs. When these exceptions are not revisited, they become permanent gaps.

Tooling boundaries further contribute to unmanaged APIs. Gateways and management platforms typically enforce policy only where traffic is routed through them. APIs that shift execution paths or are accessed internally may continue operating without enforcement while remaining nominally “managed.”

In each case, the API remains known, but the mechanisms intended to govern it no longer reflect its runtime behavior.

Security and Operational Risks of Unmanaged APIs

Unmanaged APIs introduce risk because they operate without consistent enforcement of security and governance controls. Authentication and authorization checks may be incomplete or outdated. As APIs evolve, access assumptions can drift, allowing broader access than originally intended.

Monitoring and alerting gaps are common. Unmanaged APIs may not produce logs or metrics aligned with current security standards, limiting visibility into how they are used or abused. Sensitive data exposure is a frequent consequence. APIs often provide direct access to backend systems. When data handling is not governed actively, unmanaged APIs can process or expose regulated information without appropriate safeguards.

Operational risk also increases. Without clear ownership and monitoring, incidents involving unmanaged APIs are harder to investigate and remediate. Teams may not know who is responsible for the API or how it is used in production.

Compliance obligations depend on demonstrable control over data access and processing. Unmanaged APIs undermine this requirement by operating outside verifiable governance structures.

Unmanaged APIs do not introduce new threat types. They increase exposure by weakening the controls that are expected to constrain known interfaces.

Why Traditional API Management Misses Unmanaged APIs

Traditional API management assumes that once an API is onboarded, it remains governed. In practice, this assumption rarely holds over time.

Static Inventories Age Quickly

API inventories are usually created at a specific moment. They capture what teams intended to deploy, not how APIs continue to change after release. As APIs evolve, inventories fall out of sync. Updates depend on manual processes that struggle to keep pace with delivery velocity.

Gateways Enforce Only Where Traffic Flows

API gateways apply controls only to traffic that passes through them. This works when execution paths are stable and well defined. It breaks down when APIs are accessed internally, rerouted, or bypass gateways entirely.

In these cases, an API may still appear managed in tooling while operating outside enforcement.

Documentation and Specification Drift

OpenAPI specifications and documentation describe expected behavior. They do not confirm how an API behaves in production. When code changes without corresponding updates to specifications, security controls that rely on those artifacts become incomplete.

Ownership Degrades Over Time

API ownership often changes. Teams reorganize. Responsibilities shift. An API that was once clearly managed may no longer have an active owner responsible for its security posture or policy compliance.

Management Focused on Onboarding, Not Persistence

Most API management tools emphasize registration and initial onboarding. They are less effective at validating whether controls remain in place after deployment. As a result, APIs can remain visible in inventories while drifting out of active governance.

How Unmanaged APIs Relate to Shadow and Unknown APIs

Unmanaged APIs are often discussed alongside shadow and unknown APIs, but these terms describe different conditions. Understanding how they relate helps clarify where control failures begin and how they progress.

Unmanaged APIs vs Shadow APIs

An unmanaged API is typically known to the organization but no longer subject to consistent governance or security controls. A shadow API, by contrast, is unknown or undiscovered by central teams.

The two conditions can overlap. An unmanaged API may become a shadow API if ownership is lost or if visibility degrades to the point where the API is no longer tracked. In this sense, unmanaged APIs can act as a transitional state between managed and shadow APIs. The key distinction lies in awareness. Unmanaged APIs exist within awareness boundaries. Shadow APIs exist outside them.

Unmanaged APIs vs Unknown API Endpoints

Unknown API endpoints are interfaces that the organization does not know exist, even though they are active in production. These endpoints are not documented, inventoried, or recognized by governance processes.

Unmanaged APIs differ in that their existence is acknowledged. The failure lies in control rather than discovery. Unknown endpoints represent a discovery failure. Unmanaged APIs represent a governance failure. Both conditions increase risk, but they require different remediation approaches.

Unmanaged APIs as a Precursor to Broader Visibility Gaps

Unmanaged APIs often indicate deeper issues in how API governance is maintained over time. When controls decay without detection, it becomes harder to distinguish between APIs that are merely unmanaged and those that are no longer visible at all.

In practice, organizations rarely encounter these categories in isolation. Unmanaged APIs, shadow APIs, and unknown endpoints frequently coexist, reflecting different stages of governance breakdown rather than separate problems.

Effective API security requires addressing all three conditions. Awareness alone does not prevent unmanaged APIs. Discovery alone does not prevent control drift. Governance must be validated continuously against how APIs operate in production.

Why Runtime API Governance Is Required

Unmanaged APIs persist because governance is often applied at design time rather than validated during execution. Policies, inventories, and onboarding workflows describe how APIs are expected to behave. They do not confirm how APIs actually operate once deployed.

API behavior changes continuously. Endpoints evolve, access patterns shift, and execution paths are rerouted as systems scale. When governance relies on static artifacts, control coverage erodes without obvious signals.

Runtime governance addresses this gap by evaluating APIs based on observed behavior in production. It focuses on how APIs authenticate requests, how data is accessed, and how traffic flows during execution rather than how the API was originally defined.

This approach allows governance to remain effective even as APIs change. It identifies APIs that are known but no longer governed, highlights execution paths that bypass expected controls, and surfaces drift between intended policy and runtime reality.

Runtime governance also supports continuity. Instead of relying on periodic reviews or manual audits, controls are validated continuously against live behavior. This reduces reliance on ownership memory, documentation accuracy, or tooling assumptions.

Unmanaged APIs are not a failure of intent. They are a failure of verification. Runtime API governance restores verification by aligning security controls with how APIs operate in production rather than how they are described on paper.

How Levo Supports Unmanaged API Control

Levo supports control of unmanaged APIs by aligning governance with how APIs are actually used in production. The emphasis is on execution visibility, data handling, and automated policy enforcement rather than static inventories and manual processes.

API Inventory

Levo’s API Inventory use case constructs an inventory of APIs based on observed runtime activity rather than user declared listings or design time specifications. APIs that are known but no longer actively governed are identified as part of this live inventory. This inventory reflects how APIs behave in production environments and serves as the basis for further analysis.

API Detection

Levo’s API Detection use case identifies API endpoints that are active but not covered by governance or enforcement policies. Detection is based on execution paths and runtime traffic, not on registration status or documentation. APIs that operate outside expected control boundaries are surfaced for review and classification.

API Monitoring

Levo’s API Monitoring use case continuously observes API behavior over time. This includes traffic characteristics, method usage, and access patterns across managed and unmanaged APIs. Monitoring provides a factual record of how APIs are used in production, allowing teams to track whether controls remain in place as APIs evolve.

Sensitive Data Discovery

Levo’s Sensitive Data Discovery use case analyzes API traffic to determine which APIs interact with regulated or sensitive data. APIs that handle sensitive data without governance controls are identified based on runtime observation. This data centric view of API behavior helps prioritize unmanaged APIs that carry the most risk.

API Security Testing

Levo’s API Security Testing use case evaluates APIs for security weaknesses and misconfigurations. When combined with runtime visibility, security testing can reveal vulnerabilities that persist because an API is no longer governed or regularly reviewed. This testing can be applied to unmanaged APIs identified through inventory and detection.

API Documentation

Levo’s API Documentation use case relates API behavior to published specifications. When runtime observations diverge from documented behavior, unmanaged APIs can be identified as drifted or out of sync with expected interfaces.

Aligning documentation with execution helps reduce unmanaged conditions created by specification decay.

Vulnerabilities Reporting

Levo’s Vulnerabilities Reporting use case produces consolidated reports on API security issues across the API landscape. Unmanaged APIs with detected vulnerabilities are included in these reports, enabling remediation prioritization based on execution behavior and risk context.

MCP Server

Levo’s MCP Server underpins API governance by providing a central management plane for inventory, detection, monitoring, and reporting. The MCP Server aggregates runtime observations and serves as the control point where unmanaged API conditions are recorded, tracked, and remediated.

Conclusion: Unmanaged APIs as a Governance Condition

Unmanaged APIs do not exist because organizations are unaware of them. They exist because governance is applied as a one time action rather than a continuous process.

API inventories, documentation, and onboarding workflows describe intent. They do not confirm whether controls remain in place as APIs evolve, ownership changes, or execution paths shift. Over time, this gap allows known APIs to operate outside active security and governance coverage.

Unmanaged APIs reflect a breakdown between awareness and enforcement. Addressing this condition requires validating governance against runtime behavior rather than relying on static records or periodic reviews.

Effective API security depends on aligning controls with how APIs actually operate in production. When governance is grounded in execution rather than assumption, unmanaged APIs can be identified and brought back under control before they become broader visibility or security failures.Get full visibility into your APIs in Real Time with Levo. Book your Demo today to implement API security seamlessly.