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Enterprise AI gateway checklist: security, control, and scale

An enterprise gateway is a control boundary, not a model menu. Use this checklist to evaluate access, data handling, reliability, auditability and economics.

By INFRO Editorial

Published

Updated

2 min read

A secure luminous control plane governing many enterprise AI routes inside layered boundaries

In short

An enterprise AI gateway should create one enforceable boundary for model access, data policy, routing, reliability, audit and spend. Evaluate published controls and contractual evidence, not a long model list or an architecture diagram alone.

On this page
  1. Identity and access
  2. Data path and retention
  3. Reliability and operations
  4. Financial governance

Run this with the vendor in the room. Each item should be answered with a document, a console screen or a test you watched — not a slide. Where a vendor says "on the roadmap", record it as not in place.

Identity and access

  • Organization, project and environment boundaries, with keys scoped to each.
  • Role-based access that separates who can change policy from who can read request data.
  • Key rotation with an overlap window, and revocation that takes effect immediately.
  • Model allowlists at more than one scope, with the refusing scope named in the error.
  • Every privileged change recorded with actor and timestamp, including emergency access.
  • Single sign-on and provisioning, if your policy requires them — confirm what is available today, not what is planned.

Data path and retention

  • A list of every party that can receive prompts, outputs, logs or media, including the gateway vendor's own subprocessors.
  • Prompt and completion capture off by default, with a retention window you choose and can shorten.
  • Encryption of stored provider credentials, and confirmation that credentials are never displayed after they are saved.
  • A DPA, a subprocessor list and a plain statement of which certifications are held today.
  • Where data may be processed geographically, and whether that is enforced or merely configured.

Reliability and operations

  • Failover behaviour you have watched: a provider fails in a test environment and the trace shows what happened.
  • The rule for streaming responses once output has started — retried, or surfaced as an error.
  • A policy on cross-model substitution. Availability does not justify an unevaluated downgrade.
  • Request records exportable through an API on your own schedule.
  • Incident communication: where the vendor reports problems and how quickly.

Financial governance

Under a bring-your-own-key model your providers invoice you directly, so the gateway's job is attribution and control, not billing.

  • Estimated cost per request, attributable to organization, project, key, model and your own metadata.
  • Your negotiated provider rates usable in those estimates, rather than list prices only.
  • A way to compare estimates against what your providers actually billed.
  • Budgets with both alert thresholds and hard ceilings, at more than one scope.
  • The vendor's own charges stated separately from model spend, with no percentage taken from provider usage.

From the team that builds it

Where this shows up in INFRO

INFRO is a control plane in front of the provider accounts you already hold. The capabilities below are the parts of it this article touches, each with the documentation that defines its behaviour.

  • Provider connections

    Available with a plan

    Connect provider accounts you already hold. Each credential is encrypted when saved, scoped to your organization and never shown again; applications use INFRO gateway keys instead.

    Read the documentation for Provider connections

  • Organizations and roles

    Available with a plan

    Owner, admin, developer, and analyst roles with keys and console access scoped to each.

    Read the documentation for Organizations and roles

  • Model allowlists

    Available with a plan

    Approve which models a project may call; anything else returns a policy error instead of a line item.

    Read the documentation for Model allowlists

  • Audit log

    Available with a plan

    Member, key, and policy changes recorded with actor and timestamp, viewable in the console.

    Read the documentation for Audit log

  • Budgets and spend ceilings

    Available with a plan

    A hard cap per organization, project, member, and key, with alerts at your own thresholds.

    Read the documentation for Budgets and spend ceilings

  • SSO and SCIM

    Available with a plan

    SAML and OIDC single sign-on against your own identity provider, and SCIM 2.0 provisioning so your directory creates and deactivates INFRO members. Included from the Business plan. A domain is proved by DNS before any provider can sign anybody in.

    Read the documentation for SSO and SCIM

  • Guardrails

    Available with a plan

    Pattern-based checks on chat completion prompts and responses: block, redact or flag email addresses, phone numbers, card numbers, IBANs, US Social Security numbers, IP addresses, API keys and your own terms, plus optional classifier checks on your own connection to a decision model's provider. Detection can miss things. Included from the Business plan.

    Read the documentation for Guardrails

  • Key limits and rotation

    Available with a plan

    Limit a gateway key to chosen providers or IP ranges, and rotate it with an overlap window so the old key keeps working while you deploy the new one.

    Read the documentation for Key limits and rotation

  • MCP gateway for your agents' tools

    Available with a plan

    Register your own MCP servers once with their credentials, approve and pin each tool's definition, grant gateway keys access, and let agents call those tools through INFRO with guardrails, a call log on the same trace as their model calls, and kill switches checked on every call. INFRO executes no tool.

    Read the documentation for MCP gateway for your agents' tools

INFRO accounts are self-serve. Provider usage is billed to you by your providers; INFRO charges a software subscription and takes 0% of model spend. See plans.

About this article

Last checked against its sources on . The next review is due by . No separate named reviewer is recorded for this article.

How articles are written, sourced and corrected is set out in the editorial standards.

Revision history

  1. Turned each section into a verifiable checklist, replaced pricing and reconciliation wording from INFRO's retired model with the provider-invoice model, removed the promotional template sections and generic FAQ.

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