In today’s digital-first world, APIs serve as the core infrastructure of modern business. They power mobile applications, facilitate critical cloud integrations, and support digital transformation initiatives. It's therefore understandable that 73% of CISOs consider API security a top or critical concern. However, a recent survey of 300 security leaders uncovers a troubling paradox: a large gap between awareness and action. While API security is recognized as vital, only 17% of CISOs report having a comprehensive and implemented API security strategy.
This gap highlights a security landscape in flux. Although leaders acknowledge the importance of APIs, they face significant visibility challenges, rely heavily on outdated tools, and struggle with a fundamental disconnect between fast development cycles and the time it takes to respond to security threats.
The Visibility Crisis: Flying Blind at Development Speed
The core issue often starts with mismatched paces. Modern development moves quickly, research shows 75% of APIs are updated weekly or daily, but security activities lag. The survey indicates that two-thirds of organizations audit for shadow or unmanaged APIs only on a monthly or quarterly basis. This gap creates a dangerous window of 4 to 12 weeks, allowing unmanaged changes to introduce risks.
This speed mismatch leads to widespread visibility problems. An alarming 74% of security leaders admit to being often surprised by the discovery of new, undocumented APIs in their environments. These shadow APIs typically go unmanaged and unmonitored, making them prime targets for attackers. Nearly 90% of CISOs cannot confirm their production systems are free of unknown APIs. This severe visibility issue is prompting some organizations to increase their security budgets. An Osterman Research report on CISO cybersecurity spending priorities notes that, even among companies with poor application security management, 18% are boosting their investments in API discovery, indicating a pressing need to address this foundational problem.
Dependence on Outdated Tools
Confronted with visibility issues, many leaders rely on familiar but inadequate defenses. The survey shows 76% use Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and 72% utilize API Gateways as their main security tools. However, these tools are not designed to understand the complex business logic of APIs. They cannot prevent attacks that exploit legitimate, intended functionalities to access sensitive data; they only detect known signatures of malicious activity.
This reliance fosters a false sense of security. Alarmingly, 85% of CISOs are confident that these legacy tools can block sophisticated business logic attacks, despite these tools not being tailored for such threats.
Bridging the Gap: From Awareness to Action with Salt Illuminate
The data makes it clear that the struggle is real and a strategic shift is essential. Organizations are under-resourced, with the survey revealing that only 16% of security leaders feel they are adequately staffed to triage and respond to the volume of API-related security alerts in real-time. Throwing more people at the problem isn't a scalable solution. Bridging the gap requires a modern approach that addresses the core themes of speed, visibility, and threat detection head-on.
This is where a purpose-built platform like Salt Illuminate changes the game. It helps organizations move from awareness to action by:
- Delivering Instant, Total Visibility: Salt Illuminate connects to your environment instantly, with a guided, self-service onboarding that requires no agents or traffic mirroring. This allows you to get started in minutes, not months, and immediately begin building a unified, accurate inventory. No more spreadsheets or cobbled-together tools; just a complete, real-time inventory of every internal, external, managed, and unmanaged API that serves as a single source of truth.
- Providing an Attacker's-Eye View: The platform provides an attacker's perspective on your API landscape, helping you detect and eliminate shadow, rogue, and deprecated APIs before attackers can find them. It creates a living, interactive map of your entire API fabric, displaying relationships, data flows, and attack signals in a single, unified view.
- Enforcing Governance and Compliance: With total visibility, Salt Illuminate enables you to establish security guardrails. It automatically evaluates every discovered API against best practices and regulatory frameworks, such as OWASP and PCI. The built-in API Policy Hub helps teams accelerate compliance and reduce audit fatigue, allowing you to enforce data security policies at the point of access without adding friction.
- Stopping Behavioral Attacks in Real Time: To replace the false confidence of legacy tools, Salt Illuminate utilizes patented, intent-based AI to detect threats that don't resemble attacks, until it's too late. It is purpose-built to identify and stop BOLA, abuse of legitimate functionality, and data exfiltration as they happen, with context-rich alerts that minimize noise and maximize protection.
If you're tired of flying blind, chasing patchwork inventories, and reacting too late, it's time to illuminate your API fabric. By adopting a modern, AI-driven approach, CISOs can finally bridge the gap between priority and practice, enabling secure and confident business innovation.
If you want to learn more about Salt and how we can help you on your API Security journey through discovery, posture governance, and run-time threat protection, please contact us, schedule a demo, or check out our website.