APIs play a pivotal role in the modern digital landscape. They connect services, data, and organizations to enable the streamlined experiences that customers expect in today’s competitive online ecosystem. But this reduced friction, increased speed, and unprecedented flexibility come alongside new security concerns.
Undetected and unmanaged API connections—whether they’re lurking in discarded developer environments, unsupported legacy apps, or abandoned microservices—can become easy access points for malicious actors. From there, attackers can access vital business systems and sensitive information. These unseen integrations are often referred to as shadow APIs.
Exacerbating the problem, API integrations are being added at an impressive rate, and experts predict that 2 billion will be in play by 2030.1 Faced with an ever-increasing amount of endpoints and limited resources to manage them all, many organizations are experiencing API sprawl—where they’re overwhelmed with integrations and facing numerous security risks. Each connection represents a potential attack vector.
The Impact of AI on APIs
Because AI workloads need to be deeply integrated across data pipelines, model endpoints, and third-party services, their adoption is driving API sprawl to new heights.
Training and inference deployments often use APIs for data ingestion, feature engineering, and orchestration. Developers frequently create new endpoints to test, monitor, or fine-tune models. To make matters worse, these APIs are often rolled out to cloud or containerized environments, where scale and experimentation can outpace governance. Given enough time, these activities create an expanding attack surface that security teams struggle to effectively manage.
API risks are further amplified by the sensitive or proprietary nature of AI training data. Unprotected connections to training datasets, models, or inference workloads can provide attackers with access to personal information or intellectual property. And as one may expect, today’s cyberthreats are always on the hunt for overlooked endpoints that can provide access to high-value AI systems.
Protecting APIs Requires the Right Approach
So how are organizations solving the API conundrum as they pursue AI and other innovations? Forrester defines eight essentials for protecting your organization’s API connectivity2:
- Governance: Create a defined plan that details your organizational approach to API ownership, policies, and lifecycle management. Every endpoint should be tracked, documented, and protected.
- Discovery: Use continuous scanning to detect new integrations and ensure security teams are aware.
- Testing: Regularly test for API security weak spots or misconfigured endpoints to help your organization stay ahead of threats.
- Authentication and authorization: Ensure only approved users and services can call APIs by implementing strong identity verification and role-based access capabilities.
- Protection: Enable thorough protection against abuse and data leakage with safeguards such as rate limiting, input validation, web application firewalls, and API gateways.
- Attack detection: Equip security teams to easily pinpoint attacks as they happen by inspecting API traffic for anomalies or malicious patterns.
- Attack response: Intelligently and automatically isolate, throttle, or shut down compromised endpoints in real time to limit damage.
- Third-party requirements: Extend API security standards to vendor partners since external integrations can dramatically expand attack surfaces.
Digital Innovation Requires a Secure Ecosystem
APIs are critical to AI success, stand-out digital services, and seamless customer experiences. But when left unmanaged, they can create significant risks. Shadow APIs and API sprawl result in a shifting, hard-to-manage attack surface that adversaries can easily exploit.
Through disciplined governance, continuous discovery, and layered protections, businesses can reduce risk while maintaining the agility they require. A secure API ecosystem ensures that the promise of digital innovation—faster insights, smarter applications, and richer customer engagement—can be realized without compromise.
- F5, API Security Evaluation Guide, Dec 2023
- Forrester, The Eight Components Of API Security
