As an insurance broker, NTL faces many tech challenges, including integrating with multiple insurers and external systems, ensuring security and regulatory compliance, managing system load effectively, and maintaining a high-performance platform — all while supporting rapid development, innovation, and a strong customer experience.

The team at NTL sought to reduce operational complexity, improve performance and security, and accelerate API integration for new business initiatives. That led them to Kong.

For platform engineer Adthasid Sabmake, the value that Kong and the right API strategy could bring to NTL was clear.

• Security and compliance: Ensuring trust, data protection, and adherence to regulatory standards are paramount.

• Platform resilience: Maintaining high availability and consistent performance under varying loads is essential for business continuity.

• Developer productivity: Streamlining development workflows accelerates innovation and time-to-market for new features.

These would all come together to support big-picture business objectives that would move the needle well beyond the platform team.

"Our API strategy underpins core business objectives by delivering a secure, scalable platform and accelerating the rollout of new features — directly supporting time-to-market goals and overall business performance," Sabmake said. "We leverage Kong as a core component of our APIOps strategy, utilizing it to streamline API operations and support our business outcomes." 

Kong offered many key capabilities that proved valuable to NTL:

• Deployment automation and version control: Ensures rapid and reliable API rollouts with minimal human error.

• Automated testing: Integrates seamlessly into our CI/CD pipeline to maintain quality and consistency.

• Security policy enforcement: Centralizes access control and threat protection to safeguard our platform.

• Infrastructure tenant control and migration: Simplifies management and scaling of our multi-tenant environments.

"These features collectively drive operational efficiency, reduce risks, and accelerate our time-to-market, directly contributing to overall business success," Sabmake said. 

The team's work with Kong has delivered "significant bottom-line impacts," Sabmake said. "Since adopting Kong, our team has seen dramatic improvements in system reliability and operational efficiency, allowing us to quickly monitor, manage, and scale our API ecosystem while maintaining stringent security standards."

Sabmake and his team have been able to maintain high availability and consistent performance — an essential for business continuity. To ensure robust performance under variable loads, they leveraged Kong's canary plugin and upstream target load balancing to scale our infrastructure seamlessly.

They've also reduced overall system downtime by leveraging rate limiting and HTTP logging; have optimized response times by ensuring any breach attempts are detected and contained within seconds; and breezed through infrastructure upgrades — migrating their tenant and microservices platform with near-zero downtime on an accelerated timeline.

Streamlining development workflows has accelerated innovation and time-to-market for new features. Sabmake said they've been able to minimize deployment errors, reducing API downtime caused by deployment issues. In addition, by automating API management, the team has made strides toward decreasing tedious, manual efforts.

"API management directly enhances customer satisfaction by streamlining integrations and accelerating the delivery of new features," Sabmake said. "Indirectly, it fosters innovation and platform resilience — ensuring consistent performance, robust security, and a seamless user experience."