APIs: Connectors of the Digital World, Major Targets for Enterprise Security Threats

As digital transformation deepens and the digital economy flourishes, organizations are increasingly relying on digital tools to drive innovation in management and achieve business growth. After years of exploring digital transformation, companies have come to realize that it is not a one-time effort. It requires a step-by-step, phased approach, with careful planning that considers the broader environment and integrates technology with the organization's specific circumstances.

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APIs: The Critical Hubs of an Interconnected World

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are the gateways and channels that enable seamless connectivity across various complex systems and organizations. They play a vital role in data interaction and transmission, making them key hubs as enterprises dive deeper into digital transformation. APIs are essential in the journey toward embracing microservices architecture and cloud-native technologies, facilitating interactions between business systems, public clouds, and private clouds in new scenarios.

From a practical standpoint, enterprises need a high-performance, secure, unified traffic entry point. Additionally, the multi-protocol support capabilities of API gateways allow different internal interfaces that use various protocol standards to connect and expose APIs externally. As a "cloud-native component," API gateways effectively link microservices-based business architectures. This is why API usage has exploded in recent years, with their importance rapidly increasing. However, along with this growth, API security issues have become more prominent.

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API security issues are increasing exponentially

According to a statistic by Akamai, API requests now account for 83% of all application requests, with the number of API requests expected to reach 42 trillion by 2024. Meanwhile, API security threats are growing even faster than API usage.

Gartner's research shows that in 2022, over 90% of attacks on web applications targeted APIs. International studies reveal that API attack traffic increased by 681% in one year, and 94% of all data breaches involved exposed APIs. Therefore, ensuring API security while enabling seamless connectivity across enterprise systems has become a critical need for companies. This is essential for safeguarding enterprise security and supporting a successful, secure, and compliant digital transformation.

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How to Protect API Security?

Gartner considers API gateways as powerful tools for digital transformation. In ensuring the success of digital transformation, API security and governance play a crucial role. Effective API governance and security measures can reduce unnecessary investments, significantly cutting down development and integration costs. Therefore, the key question is how to implement these measures effectively.

Paraview Software has developed an API full lifecycle management platform, an integrated solution that combines data integration, message integration, API integration, security governance, and capability openness. This platform has been successfully implemented across various industries.

The platform employs multiple layers of security mechanisms, including identity authentication and authorization, WAF penetration testing protection, data encryption, data access control, access management, comprehensive operation log tracking, and security monitoring. It provides full lifecycle security management for APIs—covering API discovery, design, testing, deployment, authorization, and approval—while integrating and interconnecting enterprise business systems. This ensures the confidentiality, integrity, availability, and immutability of APIs, meets legal and compliance requirements, and safeguards enterprise network and data security.

Conclusion

There's no doubt that API security is gaining increasing attention. Both Gartner (WAAP) and OWASP have created separate categories and threat lists specifically for API security.

Paraview will continue to integrate new technologies, building robust intelligent learning models to provide comprehensive dynamic security for APIs, helping enterprises achieve successful digital transformation securely.