Paulo Monteiro, senior engineering manager at the Universit de Lausanne, and his team faced a significant challenge when it came to developing and maintaining the complicated portfolio of higher-ed products that make up UNILs technology ecosystem. Because they have a diverse array of end users, including students, teachers, and researchers, Monteiro and his team needed to modernize their entire infrastructure.

"IT efficiency relies on smooth integration, interoperability, and coordination across all teaching and learning applications," Monteiro said. "This is a growing challenge facing modern universities, especially as more IT systems become increasingly distributed across varying products and services."

While the team at UNIL knew they needed to put structure in place to help connect and integrate these disparate systems, Monteiro was also keenly aware that an API solution implemented without careful consideration and management can introduce additional challenges.

"While APIs are popular for the ease of sharing data and services, managing access to these APIs can also be quite complex," Monteiro said. "This poses a major challenge because of the time, money, and resources required to enhance network security. Even small breaches can be catastrophic."

"To avoid potential nightmare scenarios around managing data access to our APIs, we knew we needed a solution that could solve this problem in a simple, flexible, reliable, and scalable way," said Monteiro.

UNIL selected Kong's platform to assist them in adopting a microservice architecture to decrease time to market for customer-facing applications and accelerate API adoption across the organization. By providing an abstraction layer across UNIL's monolithic and microservice-based applications, Kong's platform allows UNIL to improve its development velocity and securely manage communication between clients and microservices via API.

As Monteiro explained, "Rather than having to manage an array of networking services and associated services in isolated silos, the layer of abstraction Kong provides makes it simpler to manage distributed applications that have dependencies on a wide range of APIs."

Adding this abstraction layer has allowed Monteiro and the team at UNIL to manage their APIs at a higher level by integrating all Layer 4 through Layer 7 services for both monolithic and microservices-based applications. This means they can rapidly build and scale out a containerized infrastructure with a single entry point, for ease of management.

For UNIL, their end goal is to help internal developers more easily leverage valuable data and functionality to produce new digital products, which allows their academic community of students, teachers, and researchers to accomplish their important work in a more streamlined and efficient way.

Because UNIL processes vast volumes of data across numerous enterprise applications every day, data security and governance are one of the largest technology challenges Monteiro and his team face. Shoring up network security to protect against even small breaches (which can still be catastrophic) requires time, money, and resources that the team has to balance against other priorities.

Using Kong plugin solutions has been instrumental to UNILs ability to secure its network for its students, teachers, and administrative staff.

Kong's wide variety of plugins, across many use cases, allows UNIL to meet all of its security and governance needs, among many other needs.

The UNIL team uses the OAuth2 plugin to run their authentication and uses Kongs security plugin to add additional security layers, such as ACL, CORS, Dynamic SSL, and IP restriction. They also use the Analytics and Monitoring plugin to visualize, inspect, and monitor API traffic, giving them a clear view of what is happening in their API universe at any given time.

The team at UNIL has also implemented decK, Kong's declarative configuration tool, to completely automate its end-to-end API lifecycle. By implementing scripting for API promotion and configuration, including between environments, they've ensured that they're updating and delivering code in a consistent way.

This automation has also helped with API standardization, regularly checking that they are complete, compliant, consistent, and secure. All of this automation and standardization of their security and data governance processes frees up time and resources to focus on innovation and improving development velocity.

Emerging digital technologies have changed the landscape for almost every aspect of our lives, and higher education is no exception. The team at UNIL asked themselves how they can best prepare their IT infrastructure for the reality of the digital world, as well as stay prepared for the future.

Monteiro sees APIs and systems integration as the foundation for UNIL's digital transformation, making it possible to build new systems that seamlessly share data among applications. They have already seen success through the development of their campus-wide mobile application, which integrates information from multiple systems to tell students when and where their next classes might be, view cafeteria menus, give access to course documents, search the UNIL directory, and more. All of this is only possible because of the API-first strategy that Monteiro and the team have implemented.

Looking ahead, Monteiro plans to continue using Kong to enhance the university's student success support. This includes enabling easier student enrollment while also providing his team with the ability to quickly resolve IT issues and reduce overall IT ticket rates. To enable this, they're moving towards automating all their API configurations, which will help them build a unified API ecosystem for all teams across the organization.

Through Kong's flexibility, extensibility, and automation provided via APIOps, UNIL has been able to successfully implement new technology standards across its campus while unifying its sprawling API ecosystem.

"Kong has helped us to complete our application modernization with a microservices-based approach in a fast, reliable, and scalable way," Monteiro said.