# Why You Need an Event Gateway for Kafka

This session explains why organizations should put an event gateway in front of Kafka brokers and how to build a business case around lower risk, less operational overhead, lower infrastructure cost, and broader access to event data. The speakers argue that exposing brokers directly creates the same governance problems APIs once had: onboarding new consumers can take weeks because authentication, authorization, ACLs, regional replication, and testing are handled manually. An event gateway centralizes identity, encryption, audit logging, topology hiding, and payload schema validation, which improves security and compliance while reducing the need to replicate full clusters by using regional data planes and virtual clusters instead. They also position the gateway as important for AI-era architectures, since agents and developers may need REST access, webhook-driven event delivery, and consistent controls across APIs and events. A customer example showed onboarding dropping from days to minutes, and the practical starting advice was to audit the environment, run a focused pilot, and treat event topics as products rather than pipes.