How to be proactive about your API security

1. How to be proactive about your API security

2. Introduction And API security is often at the core of these breaches. In fact, by 2022, API abuses will be the most frequent attack vector that results in enterprise data breaches, according to a recent prediction by Gartner analyst Mark O’Neill. API governance is essential to the success of your digital business. By following strategic API security, monitoring, and open cultural practices, you can turn your COE from a corporate buzzword to a long-term stabilizing strategy.

3. The Mistake, Most Companies, Are Making Companies have gotten pretty good at knowing when something is going wrong with their system and when they need to fix a bug. But that’s not enough data to make informed decisions. You need to know the health of a specific project and the whole developer life cycle of a product. Sadly, enterprises are still project-driven instead of product-driven, with budgets and deadlines tied to delivering project features, not holistically examining a product and its capabilities.

4. Most enterprises check their API security at the end of the life cycle. They run regression tests to see if it works or not. Then, it's magically secure if it passes a confined set of tests. This last-mile mindset is behind personal healthcare data, payment information, and billing address leaks making headlines daily.

5. How to do API governance right API Governance should be about creating a mindset throughout an organization rather than being treated like a set of people who develop processes. It must be more than just assuring a specific set of projects runs in a certain way and making sure the projects add value.

6. The solution should automate your API security best practices into your entire API life cycle. You need to have in-house systems or subscribe to a system already doing that as part of an ecosystem to function right. It’s a top-down approach that knows what questions to ask and when and uses a powerful security toolkit.

7. Asking the right questions • Governance in the API space means constantly asking: • Why do I need this API? • Who are my API’s consumers? • What are consumers’ usage patterns? • Do they need this API? • What is the behavioral design for this API? • What is my ROI?

8. Knowing when and how to ask questions When you have a small product, you could probably continue to ask these questions through manual work. But once your company is scaling, you start to lose track of data and cut corners to meet deadlines. API security needs to be built into your API modeling, both into your test-driven design and into your conversations with every part of the business.

9. API analysts will be tasked with building an API specification under OpenAPI (formerly Swagger), and they will just focus on the UI, the interface, what data models they need, and, incredibly, what the consumers are demanding.

10. You also need to be asking: Where are these requests coming from? You need to be designing APIs based on the systems and devices they are getting integrated into, as they are a growing threat from hacks, which risks sensitive information.

11. They are fixing poor API governance retroactively. What about the enterprises that haven’t built security from the start? I’ve certainly walked into enterprises where there are already many services out there for APIs to consume. There’s no time like the present to change your ways. Security must create a sense of urgency within your organization. You should make a point to revisit your API security in your next immediate sprint

12. Take charge of your API security. A successful company must be proactive. You need to integrate security into your governance at each stage of your agile process. A continuous learning mindset around API security is the only way to succeed proactively.