It would be impossible to have effective API security without robust analytics and threat intelligence capabilities, that power root cause analysis, forensic research, and incident response.
1. API security data lake: you need to ability to collect and analyze the end-to-end path trace of all API calls and service behaviors. An API security data lake allows your SOC team, incident responders, threat hunters, as well as red teams and blue teams to conduct instant security analysis and root cause analysis.
2. Understand API traffic and user attribution: Understand API traffic history of user attributed transactions, sequences, and flows and perform post mortem reviews and analysis for any API security incidents.
3. Threat Hunting to reveal unknown API vulnerabilities: Perform threat hunting to reveal potentially unknown API vulnerabilities and visualize user behavior analytics to uncover fraud and abuse.
This level of security analytics enables SOC teams and threat hunters to optimize APIs and service behaviors to prevent the possibility of any data breach, ransomware, abuse, or data exfiltration.
An API security platform needs to be able to handle massive scale. This is especially true for large financial and retail organizations that provide tens of thousands of APIs, and need to handle billions of API calls.
This is why it's crucial to have an API security solution that is designed to process and analyze APIs, application communication, and user behavior data at cloud scale.
In addition, it should have the capability to support very large deployments consisting of thousands of API endpoints, and billion of API calls -- with flexible data collection and deployment options, including agentless or agents, depending on your needs: 1. fully out-of-band via network log analysis of AWS, GCP, and Azure Clouds, 2. Collection by instrumentation within your API gateway, proxies, or service mesh, and 3. in-app data collection through instrumentation by language-specific agents or socket filtering.
For highly regulated industries, look for a solution that can also be deployed 100% on-premise in a fully air-gapped model, without sacrificing protection, speed or scalability.
Enable Zero Trust API Access to Improve Enterprise and Data Security.
Today’s cloud-based, API-driven, microservices-based applications all extensively operate using APIs to communicate between users/NPE’s (non-person entities) to applications, and between applications and application components.
API Security solutions are essential to aligning Zero Trust thinking with the realities of today’s application architectures and extending the Zero Trust security model to the full application stack.
However, to date, APIs have been largely neglected by Zero Trust models. In addition, digital transformation demands and DevSecOps processes at organizations have created new gaps and vulnerabilities attackers can exploit.
As you are seeking an API security solution, look for one that is capable of enhancing your Zero Trust Security strategy. We recommend API security that can map to the NIST Zero Trust framework, as it covers reference architecture, data security, as well as compliance measures for defense in depth security.