As the technological landscape increasingly integrates AI, Cindric anticipates a profound impact on the evolution of APIs, emphasizing the growing importance of API security, authentication, and the challenges posed by zombie endpoints.
Your recent report indicates a 96% growth in AI-related APIs in 2023.
You might not see or understand it, but at the end of the day, all those questions, image lookups, or jokes are API requests.
Given the recent popularity of AI-based and AI-assisted tooling, we also see a matching growth in the number of APIs needed to power those.
APIs have been growing at a CAGR of 25% for the past few years, but that growth doubled in 2023, all thanks to AI. We predict that AI-based APIs will continue to drive API growth in 2024 as they go hand in hand.
APIs are already the fundamental building blocks of any modern organization today, and that will become even more evident going forward.
As organizations look to transform their digital business and enter the era of the API economy, we expect that we will be building and using more and more APIs.
APIs will play a more critical role as the world transitions to more browserless devices.
All this growth and expansion means more APIs, requests, and security challenges.
The toughest thing about API security is that, in most cases, organizations don't know that hackers exploit their APIs because they don't have access to API data in real-time.
The data shows a high prevalence of zombie endpoints in APIs.
Organizations have many zombie endpoints simply because they don't have access to data showing how their customers use their APIs.
The implications for organizations are grave as hackers can quickly find out which endpoints are up to date and which aren't, especially if the API documentation is publicly available.
Authentication is the most basic form of API security, and every organization's priority should be to implement any form of authentication as soon as possible.
API observability and governance will become essential tools for any organization building APIs.
If you're building a business around APIs, you need to understand how your engineering teams build them and how your customers use them.
Just like websites use tools like Google Analytics, you'll need the same for your APIs, especially as APIs become increasingly complicated.
Many organizations still need to figure out their API strategy and how to build a successful business around APIs.
It all comes down to execution, where you need quality tooling to help you operationally move from one phase of the API life-cycle to another.
APIs are not going anywhere; they'll just become even more critical and complicated in the future.
This Cyber News was published on www.helpnetsecurity.com. Publication date: Wed, 03 Jan 2024 06:43:04 +0000