Digital Transformations Rely on APIs

Digital transformation (DX) projects remain a priority for organizations even in the face of economic headwinds. Primary DX drivers include improving workforce productivity and engagement, improving customer experience and reducing costs through operational efficiencies, according to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise (VotE): Workforce Productivity & Collaboration, Digital Transformation 2023 survey. The study results indicate that organizations will continue allocating a significant portion of IT budgets to these initiatives over the next two years.

DX projects also face barriers including the complexity of legacy applications, overcoming organizational hurdles and silos, embracing business process change management and potential failure to secure sensitive data. At the same time, the move to cloud continues unabated, with future software investments primarily driven by cloud deployments and technologies that ease integrations with existing enterprise software. DX, combined with the increasing pace of cloud adoption, has led to an increasing prevalence of and dependence on application programming interfaces (APIs) — the “services glue” that enables interoperation of these systems. Attackers, realizing this, have increasingly focused on exploiting APIs, which can provide access to a wealth of sensitive and valuable data and systems even while their exploitation is notoriously difficult to detect. This paper focuses on API security, including key capabilities, trends and potential solutions.