Security Breach: How to Leverage APIs to Protect You

API integration has become a necessity for application customers to streamline operations across their business and products, making integration an integral part of product development, business strategy, and advanced scalability. However, companies are finding themselves hesitant when approaching API security. Security is one of the most critical components to consider when using API integration, but many companies see this to be the biggest issue they face. With 60% of companies agreeing that API integration is critical to their business strategy, security of the data shared and accessed needs to assure businesses that they are not leaking data and their APIs are not compromised.

The Problem

The biggest problem that development and security teams face is the fast-paced development of technology each day, leaving companies concerned that they are not able to implement API integrations without data leakage. Isabelle Mauny, Co-founder and CTO of 42Crunch, assures us that although this will always be an issue companies face, there are ways to prevent security breaches from occurring, similar to Facebook's previous leakages.

Although Isabelle states that we are currently in a stagnant position when it comes to API security, this allows the opportunity for businesses to capitalize and develop their security. To achieve the best security on API integrations, developers need to be agile and innovative when approaching the question. This might cause a business to give in other areas, but the overall outcome will result in a multi-sided business model. Additionally, companies can't put off implementing security further down the road because this will slow down innovation.

Optimize API Integration

So then how do you implement security into your company at the beginning, so that a business can optimize their API integration potential? Isabelle states that security teams need to identify the necessary security precautions required and translate those requirements into code so that the development team can run the security automatically within each step of the API lifecycle. Security cannot be an afterthought, but a task that both security and development teams need to work together to tackle. Moreover, the developers should not be in charge of security, but a collaborative security team should work alongside developers to prevent security breaches. The end goal being that real security can be implemented without the developers being concerned that the data being shared or accessed is not leaked.