Customer-facing, partner-facing, and internal APIs are vital for mobile, SaaS, and web applications in industries from banking to retail and autonomous vehicles. But the widespread adoption of APIs as the vehicle for internet traffic has led to an increase in attacks on API endpoints. Edge computing security leader Akamai found more than 11 billion total attempted API attacks over just 18 months.

API endpoints are similar to internet-facing web servers – the more open access the public has, the greater the threat from malicious actors.

DevSecOps – the cultural and technical movement toward breaking down silos between development, security, and operations – sees a push toward automation and design that integrates security as code as a shared responsibility. For DevSecOps teams, securing APIs is paramount to a healthy software development lifecycle. 

It’s time to stop looking at security as an external bottleneck, but rather a partner in building a stable long-term strategy. You can achieve that by changing company attitudes and investing in API tools that facilitate API testing, enforce governance standards, and automate recurring security tasks.

Be product-driven, not project-driven

Many brands have been unsuccessful in their digital transformations as they don’t see APIs adding value, and they’ve lost track of the potential return on investment (ROI) from APIs. If you don’t see APIs as a business asset or adding value, you won’t protect them or intend to oversee their security performance. In fact, many enterprises check their API security at the end of the lifecycle.

However, API-as-a-Product strategies are gaining traction among the developer community – moving away from delivering project features (with budgets and deadlines) to holistically examining APIs as products and assessing their capabilities. 

If you have in mind that you’ll monetize your APIs in the future, whatever type of API it may be, security will more likely be top of mind, and you’ll be inclined to adopt a human-centered design approach. That’s why security should be prioritized initially and not considered an afterthought.

Avoid a last-mile mindset by running regression tests, and instead, adopt a design-first approach from the outset with the help of an API management platform, like APIwiz. This will also ensure that APIs are based on solid, proven authentication and authorization mechanisms such as OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect.

The majority of services that we use daily rely on interconnected APIs, so API testing tools are absolutely critical. They allow developers to see if an API is reacting adequately to unexpected inputs or possible security attacks, and they are what immediately show if an application is running with optimized functionality, reliability, and security.

The purpose of API testing is to test your API contract to make sure services can communicate and that the data shared between them is consistent with a specified set of rules or standard. You can run user authentication, parameter tampering, unhandled HTTP, and fuzz testing. And in the API testing market, there are many solutions that exist including cross-cloud API testing software, software that supports asynchronous testing and CI/CD integrations, and end-to-end testing. Many solutions also support various formats, so developers don’t need to learn a new language. 

At APIwiz, we believe in continuous testing and robust test coverage based on API contracts that have been designed and approved. Plus, the chaining together of complex API transactions and workflows can test cases on-demand using continuous delivery or CI/CD to reduce downtime. Continuous testing is essential across your DevSecOps pipeline

Implement security observability for the whole API lifecycle

API security considerations have long been overlooked due to the need to meet ever-increasing business demands. But no business can afford software security checks to be the final piece of an API lifecycle. You need to inject security into your 360-degree view of your API lifecycle management from the start at all levels: planning, designing, developing, testing, release management, all the way to deprecation.

Throughout the whole API lifecycle, developers must have oversight every step of the way. An API management platform can provide workflow visualizers that show APIs’ entire path to production in a single view with issue alerts. This means faster production using CI/CD in your DevSecOps pipeline to build trusted artifacts and quicker iterations, guaranteeing a security-first mindset. 

API tools also allow perimeter scans to discover and inventory your APIs and allow for easy breakdowns for DevSecOps teams to work with. At APIwiz, our command line interface (CLI) is a unified tool for managing and controlling multiple services from the command line or with automation through scripts. This is all to make APIs much more easily discoverable. You can know where and how many of your APIs are deployed—enterprises simply need that level of visibility. An API team is only as successful as the set of tools at its disposal. 

There is no mystery in API security, and best practices are quite familiar to seasoned security professionals. But if you aren’t sure where to begin, you can start by establishing solid API security policies through an API management platform. 

Collaborative API governance is also a must for your organization’s security, read our blog for more.