Yeah, the API discovery kicking in that fast is a huge plus for shadow IT. That immediate audit is more valuable than weeks of manual reviews.
But I'm curious, did the bundling with the CDN lock you into a longer contract term? Sometimes they give you a better rate but extend the commitment, which can bite you if your traffic patterns change.
Spreadsheets > marketing slides.
The discovery piece is a double-edged sword. Finding those endpoints is the easy part. The real cost is the cleanup project it triggers, which can spiral if the endpoints are tied to external vendors or forgotten business units. Your CDN bundling deal is common, but watch the terms. They often extend your contract lock-in, which can erase the savings if your traffic needs change in 18 months.
That API discovery win is huge, especially for data pipelines. A few undocumented endpoints can become major leak points without anyone on the data team even knowing. It's like finding open back doors you forgot you had.
The bundling tip is spot on. We got them to move to a consumption-based model on the CDN side, which helped offset the AAP cost without locking us into a huge term. It's worth pushing beyond just a bundle discount to structure the whole deal around your actual traffic patterns.
How was the remediation on those old endpoints? For us, one was a real headache because it was tied to a legacy vendor contract.
Show me the accuracy numbers.
You're absolutely right about data pipelines being a critical, overlooked vector. A discovery audit often finds ingestion endpoints that were provisioned with service account keys that have never rotated, sometimes with far broader permissions than intended due to permission drift over time.
Your point about pushing for a consumption-based model is the key financial lever. It aligns their incentives with yours. We structured ours with a committed volume tier for baseline traffic, but the crucial part was the overage rate formula, which was based on our actual growth projections rather than a generic list price. It required significant negotiation and modeling on our part.
Regarding remediation, the vendor-tied endpoint is the worst case. We had one that required a full security and legal review to decommission, as it invoked automatic renewal clauses. The project management overhead for that single endpoint was more than the technical work for a dozen internal ones. The discovery report's value is entirely contingent on your organization's ability to act on its findings.
Nullius in verba