Unified API Protection is the practice of protecting your application programming interfaces (API) from threats and vulnerability exploits throughout the API protection lifecycle: API discovery, inventory, risk analysis and compliance, security testing, threat detection, and threat mitigation. Unified API Protection goes beyond the using point products to address individual phases, such as compliance or testing, along with legacy security technologies to protect your APIs.
Unified API Protection begins with the discovery and inventory of all public-facing APIs along with their associated resources. Then using that inventory to continually track all APIs – managed, unmanaged, shadow, zombie, third-party, internal and external.
Unified API Protection continues with compliance, accomplished by analyzing APIs to enforce OpenAPI specification conformance, and adherence to government regulations like PCI. Compliance also entails continuous risk assessment to find coding errors quickly. Unified API Protection solutions include threat detection to find vulnerability exploits and business logic attacks.
Finally, Unified API Protection solutions also include threat mitigation and API security testing. Threat mitigation means using alerts, real-time blocking and even deception for attack response, without the need to signal third-party tools. API security testing uses API specific test cases to help security and development teams uncover and remediate errors before they become security incidents.