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How to meet API security standards efficiently

Like a chef, API producers seek the right ingredients to develop APIs. When these ingredients are scattered across environments and gateways, it’s hard to discover available APIs and ensure they meet API security standards.

Organizations are left with a recipe for disaster.

Consider that 78% of enterprise decision-makers don’t know how many APIs they have.

Beyond creating duplicate work and stalling innovation, this lack of API inventory presents a considerable security risk. After all, APIs made up 29% of web attacks in 2023.

Amplify Enterprise Marketplace positions API producers to work faster while ensuring all the APIs they publish adhere to stringent API security standards. This level of governance has become even more critical in today’s landscape. Here’s why.

The growing need for API governance

In a survey of over 40,000 developers and API professionals, 60% reported using generative AI in their role. Over half used AI to find bugs in their code, and over a third used AI tools to generate usable code.

With these tools, organizations have been able to create APIs at an unprecedented rate. While creating avenues for additional revenue streams and better business performance, rapid API development also vastly expands an organization’s API sprawl, creating new security risks.

In a recent Axway report, 74% of enterprise decision-makers agreed that over 20% of their APIs are unmanaged. As the number of APIs rises, it becomes harder for organizations to maintain visibility over their ecosystem, leaving more room for unknown risks to lurk in the background.

Learn about zombie APIs and how to survive the apocalypse

These struggles make it clear that federated API management is a critical capability – making it possible to unify and manage your distributed APIs under a single pane of glass for improved governance, security, and compliance.

Dive Deeper into API Governance at the Enterprise Level

How Amplify supports API producers: a customer example

API producers collect APIs from different places and ensure they are properly secured. With no automated way to see if APIs are available and compliant, upholding API security standards becomes more difficult.

This was a hang-up for a prominent IT hardware/software company we’ll call “Amplify Tech” for our purposes.

With an explosion in the number of APIs and development across different platforms, the company needed an easier way to find and manage its API sprawl.

Amplify Enterprise Marketplace was the right solution for the job.

The company’s API producers now had a way to automatically discover APIs from any environment — AWS, IBM, Postman, etc. From a single pane of glass, they could see all the APIs available to them, ensuring no APIs went unnoticed.

Was each API following the correct organizational standards, though?

Automated compliance tests in Amplify Enterprise Marketplace deliver this assurance. Before APIs are published to the marketplace, the solution runs a ruleset to ensure API security and design clearance.

 

 

So, while significantly reducing the odds of duplicate work with an accurate API inventory, the company can maintain the safety and trust of their APIs.

What about application developers?

When the company’s application developers log into the API marketplace, they see a curated list of API products. This allows them to find what they need quickly.

When they select an API product, they can easily see reviews, access support, find detailed documentation, and request credentials. With the ability for API producers to set APIs to mocked, developers can leverage APIs before they’re finished.

What about API product managers?

From Amplify Enterprise Marketplace, the company’s API product managers can access insights from all API gateways. They can gather analytics to help guide business decisions without toggling between multiple API vendors.

The marketplace is also equipped with a leaderboard. From a single pane of glass, product managers can see which APIs are used the least and the most. This visibility offers the company a better sense of where to direct investments.

Axway VP Digital Transformation Catalysts Brian Otten dives deeper into the role of API product managers in the following video:

 

 

Learn more about resources for API product managers here.

Move from chaos to clarity with Amplify Enterprise Marketplace

Amplify Enterprise Marketplace allows companies to use their own API gateways for centralized management. This unified approach provides a more robust way to govern and secure APIs throughout every stage.

[Watch] API Management Simplified: From API Chaos to Business Clarity

For companies like “Amplify Tech,” the marketplace has proven to help accelerate API development and adoption — with confidence that APIs are secure.


See Amplify Enterprise Marketplace in action. Watch the demo.

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