Case Study: UnitedHealth Group achieves scalable, cost-efficient API management with Kong Gateway

UnitedHealth Group Insures API Management With Kong Gateway

UnitedHealth Group, through Optum, needed a more scalable and performant API management platform to support a Fortune 7 healthcare environment with thousands of APIs, heavy internal traffic, and growing DevOps needs. Their existing closed-source API gateway was costly, difficult to innovate around, and had stability, scalability, and performance issues that frustrated internal API providers.

Kong provided Kong Gateway as an open source, cloud-native replacement, and UnitedHealth Group built internal documentation, security controls, monitoring, and a GitHub-based self-service workflow on top of it. With Kong, the company cut gateway overhead by 85%, improved resource efficiency by 90%, reduced API management service cost by 95%, and lowered operations staffing by 85%, while scaling from about 1,900 proxies and 375 million monthly transactions in 2019 to more than 11,000 proxies and 4.5 billion monthly transactions in 2020.

UnitedHealth Group

Ross Sbriscia

Lead Software Engineer