2024 Market Guide for API Protection: Akto featured by Gartner
The Gartner Market Guide on API Protection reveals top insights on the market direction and tools that you should be using in your DevSecOps pipeline.
Raaga Srinivas
8 mins
Read the full Gartner Market Guide for API Protection
With 37% of respondents considering security among their top challenge as part of their API strategy, according to the 2024 Gartner API Strategy Survey, the Gartner Market Guide on API Protection reveals top insights on the market direction and tools that you should be using in your DevSecOps pipeline.
This Market Guide can help security and risk management leaders understand which specialized products can assist in securing their organization’s APIs, and how. - Gartner
Here are some key findings from the report.
What is API Protection?
API protection products safeguard APIs from misuse and security breaches, while also aiding in rectifying API vulnerabilities. These products offer API discovery, posture management, and real-time protection as cloud-based or on-premises solutions. They cater to organizations needing to shield their data assets, primarily from attacks on public first-party APIs, while also covering internal and third-party APIs.
Ideally, your API Protection product should provide the following coverage:
API Runtime Protection (or API detection and response)
This is supported by other common features such as providing API security governance, identifying sensitive data, API security testing, and easy and automated deployment.
Who should use API Protection products?
Particularly, banking, financial services, insurance, and online retail industries are keen on specialized API protection, but enterprises from all sectors, especially regulated ones, are exploring the market.
However, the end-users of these tools are ultimately security practitioners to whom these will add the most value in implementing their overall API Security strategy.
These products generate remediation guidance and responses that have an impact and trigger collaboration with various groups, such as developers, security operations, platform engineering, and infrastructure and operation teams. - Gartner
Market Direction - The API Protection Landscape
The API protection market currently is experiencing platform consolidation, with some standalone vendors acquired to enhance broader Web Application and API Protection (WAAP).
Market signals for the potential and demand for cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) solutions and partnerships between API gateway or CIPS providers, and specialized API protection vendors have been positive. Despite this, there remains a strong preference for stand-alone, specialized vendors.
Yet, while the market continues to grow, products still have much scope for improvement. With the technology still maturing (For example, runtime protection products still display too many false positives), and market conditions evolving, vendors continue to play aggressive growth and pricing strategies, heavily influenced by geopolitical events.
The recent geopolitical changes that raised inflation, including resultant interest rate rises and cost cutting, impacted the market and obliged some of these vendors to lower the expectations and valuations, and settle for longer exit strategies with milder expected growth. - Gartner
Nonetheless, vendors remain optimistic about the emerging capabilities of tools that include features of API security governance and the ability to understand sensitive data flows and enforce remediating actions. With a growing market comes the need for sophisticated platforms to handle nuanced edge cases.
Security leaders require additional security capabilities to protect their APIs beyond basic, but necessary, security policy enforcement such as rate limiting, token validation, session management, and transport security — especially in industry verticals with high-security requirements. - Gartner
Market Analysis - API Security Posture Management and API Security Testing
API protection is an important component of a complete API security program. API protection does not equate to API security. Proper access control and security policy enforcement are primordial. API protection tools build on that. - Gartner
In the context of API Protection, API discovery is the first step in a comprehensive API security strategy. What follows next is how you might use this data to secure your APIs. This involves API security posture management and API security testing.
API posture management and API security testing, though theoretically distinct, often yield similar outcomes. Posture management passively analyzes API operations to detect misconfigurations and is better suited for identifying business logic exposures rather than technical vulnerabilities. In contrast, API security testing, including dynamic application security testing (DAST) and fuzzing, actively tests the API by simulating attacks to uncover technical vulnerabilities.
Both are essentials to your API protection toolkit and are precisely what Akto does.
Akto: the Pro-active DevSecOps Platform
Akto’s capabilities encompass the breadth of API discovery, security posture management, and API security testing, all in a completely automated way.
API Discovery
Security leaders often mention that the main objective of this exercise is to identify dormant (also known as “zombie”) and shadow (also known as “rogue”) APIs. Both of these types of APIs are problematic because they are not visible to the organization and thus do not abide by the organization’s security policies. - Gartner
Akto automatically discovers external, internal APIs, third-party and shadow APIs and monitors them in real-time across various formats, including REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and JSONP. Check out our docs to see how.
Our system eliminates the need to manually update swagger file. Instead, Akto creates an upto date swagger file and proactively alerts you about new or changed APIs, enabling efficient management of your API security risks.
API Security Posture Management
Solutions increasingly try to evaluate the risk of each misconfiguration and prioritize them based on characteristics such as the criticality of the API, and whether it is publicly exposed. - Gartner
Akto's platform can identify sensitive parameters through API request and response. Our comprehensive database encompasses over 100 types of sensitive data, such as email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and credit card information.
Akto also groups your APIs in order of severity through our in-built ‘risk score’ metric to give you a better sense of your overall security posture.
API Security Testing
Some API protection vendors offer stand-alone API security testing as part of their broader offering. This type of testing is meant to be applied throughout the development life cycle, with an emphasis on the earlier stages and usage by developers. - Gartner
With our superpower- Akto’s Test Library, you can test your APIs for vulnerabilities using our 400+ inbuilt, completely customizable YAML templates at all stages of your development life cycle.
Akto covers all aspects of the latest OWASP Top 10 and HackerOne Top 10 ensuring complete coverage. We are particularly distinguished for our advanced test suites focusing on broken authentication and authorization. Akto maps each vulnerability discovered with associated CWE and related CVEs to give context of the finding to the developers.
Final Thoughts
The Gartner Market Guide shines a light on the current state of the API protection market as well as what you should expect from your API security tools. As this market continues to evolve, Akto remains at the forefront, continuously updating and refining our platform to meet the ever-changing needs of API security.
Read the full Gartner Market Guide for API Protection to know more.
Book a demo for your API Security Strategy today.
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