Modern businesses are increasingly reliant on APIs. They are the building blocks facilitating data exchange and communication between disparate systems. Because of their prevalence and importance, they are also under attack by actors exploiting vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Unauthorized access, data exposure, injection attacks, broken authentication, DoS attacks, shadow or unmanaged APIs, insecure API dependencies, and more present a real risk to APIs and the organizations that use them. As more APIs enter production, the attack surface grows ever larger. Most organizations are aware of these threats and know they must protect against them. OWASP is doing a great job pinpointing these issues. The problem, however, is that many organizations are confused about which tools to use to solve which problems, leaving them at risk of attack. Much of this confusion surrounds API gateways and API protection. This confusion is understandable. Both tools provide security capabilities for APIs. However, they are not interchangeable: organizations must use API gateways and API protection, not one or the other. What are API Gateways? As the name suggests, API gateways are a single, centralized entry point for managing, routing, and optimizing API traffic between clients and backend services. They primarily provide operational and performance-related functions while providing basic security features. What is API Protection? API protection – or API security – refers to a…Read More