1 Introduction
Today, Application Programming Interfaces or APIs can be found everywhere — at home and in mobile devices, in corporate networks and in the cloud, even in industrial environments. The emerging era of Generative AI is also entirely dependent on APIs to implement integrations with existing business applications. In short, APIs are now powering the logistics of delivering digital products to partners and customers. They can also unlock new business models for companies to offer their core services in innovative ways or to reach new customers.
The flip side of this booming digital economy is the simple fact that APIs have a strong impact on nearly every business’s operational efficiency, scalability, and agility and, in the end, directly influence its profitability. Unfortunately, many organizations still tend to underestimate the challenges of exposing their APIs without a security strategy and infrastructure in place. Even worse, quite a few of those still believe they have their API security completely covered with old-school tools like web application firewalls or intrusion detection systems.
However, a proper, well-planned strategy for protecting various internal and external, in-house and 3rd-party APIs must address every step along the API lifecycle, which, at least for APIs developed in-house, starts with secure design and software development, long before the operational phase.
In later phases, multiple other challenges must be accounted for as well, including but not limited to network security, protection against numerous API-specific threats and exploits, strong authentication, fine-grained access control, maintaining sensitive data integrity, as well as monitoring and analytics.
In other words, API security has long become an industry of its own; with the scope of risks and challenges the industry confronts growing exponentially, modern API security solutions have grown in complexity themselves.
Providing comprehensive protection against the broad range of API-specific threats and doing it consistently throughout the whole lifecycle of an API is complex and requires a comprehensive, platform approach, with multiple security solutions operating in a tightly integrated manner that makes them more than just the sum of individual components.
