ChatGPT and Claude don't just answer questions anymore. Employees are connecting them directly to Notion, Linear, Jira, and the rest of your stack. The AI can read, write, and take actions on company data. Most IT and security teams have no visibility into any of it.

Harmonic Security Connectors changes that. It sits inline with every AI-to-app connection, so you see each call, control what data moves, and block destructive actions before they happen. Employees notice nothing different.

See what's actually running across your business in a live demo.

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In the coming weeks I will be unifying my Podcast (formerly, the API Governance for Scale podcast) and this newsletter, the Ikenna Consulting Newsletter, under the API Platforms for Scale brand. This branding highlights the fact that mature API platforms are critical API governance but also to the entire agent and developer experience. While Ikenna Consulting remains as my company brand, you will see this newsletter move over to a new domain for API Platforms for Scale.

We will continue to bring you intelligence on the trends, technologies, and practices shaping API platforms, MCP, developer, and agent experience.

Many organisations treat AI governance as something to address after deployment. That approach may already be outdated. Mahdi Assan argues that governance should be built into AI systems from the very beginning, rather than bolted on as a compliance exercise. By embedding legal, technical, and organisational controls early, organisations can move faster with greater confidence while reducing risk as AI systems scale.

The AI era is forcing platform teams to rethink what a platform really is. Alan Shimel argues that Platform Engineering 2.0 isn't defined by a single technology such as Kubernetes, Backstage, or an internal developer portal. Instead, it's a unified platform that brings together infrastructure, AI, security, governance, observability, FinOps, and developer experience to support both human developers and AI agents.

Giving AI agents unrestricted access to enterprise systems isn't a strategy—it's a security risk. This session explores how the NetScaler MCP Gateway brings governance, authentication, and policy enforcement to the Model Context Protocol, enabling organisations to control what AI agents can access and how they interact with enterprise services. As MCP adoption grows, gateways are emerging as a critical layer for secure, enterprise-scale AI deployments.

As organisations deploy more AI agents, MCP servers, and reusable skills, a new challenge is emerging: how do you govern them all? Amit Arora and Omri Shiv from AWS introduce MCP Gateway and Registry, an open-source platform that brings discovery, access control, auditability, and lifecycle governance to AI assets at enterprise scale. It shows why governing AI capabilities is becoming just as important as governing APIs, enabling organisations to scale agentic AI without losing visibility or control.

As AI shifts from experiments to enterprise infrastructure, tokens are becoming a metered resource that must be managed, secured, and governed. Immánuel Fodor and Sudeep Goswami introduces a reference architecture for Token as a Service (TaaS), arguing that the real challenge isn't running AI models—it's governing identity, usage, costs, policies, and agent access across the entire AI ecosystem. It presents a unified control plane spanning APIs, AI gateways, and MCP gateways to deliver secure, auditable, and sovereign AI services at scale.

Your biggest AI security risk may not be the MCP servers you know about, it's the ones you don't. Bill Doerrfeld explores the growing problem of Shadow MCP, where teams deploy MCP servers outside IT and security oversight to accelerate AI adoption. It explains why unmanaged agent access can quickly become an enterprise risk and outlines practical governance strategies for bringing MCP servers under centralised visibility and control without slowing innovation.

Great APIs don't just improve the developer experience: they accelerate the entire business. This customer story explores how PlanetScale used Speakeasy to automate SDK generation, improve API consistency, and reduce the engineering effort required to support developers. It demonstrates how investing in API tooling can speed up product delivery while making APIs easier to adopt and maintain.

Enterprise AI governance doesn't stop at models and prompts. It extends to the licences your employees use every day. Nolan Di Mare Sullivan highlights a growing compliance blind spot: developers using personal AI subscriptions outside enterprise controls. Without central visibility, organisations can lose auditability, governance, and policy enforcement—even when they have enterprise AI platforms in place.

The Ikenna Consulting Newsletter curates intelligence on the trends, technologies, and practices shaping API platforms, MCP, developer, and agent experience.