API Security and Management: Market Overview, Current Trends, Future Developments

From what used to be a purely technical concept created to make developers’ lives easier, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have evolved into one of the foundations of modern digital business. APIs are now powering the logistics of delivering digital products to partners and customers. Almost every software product or cloud service now comes with a set of APIs for management, integration, monitoring, or a multitude of other purposes.

This evolution only continues to accelerate. As new digital transformation initiatives across various industries emerge, diverse business models are reshaping the technical requirements for API development and operations dramatically. New standards, technologies, and development methodologies introduced by the need to support numerous use cases have also introduced additional complexity to existing API management platforms.
REST APIs are still commonly used today, but they are increasingly augmented or displaced with a variety of alternative protocols and standards, such as GraphQL or gRPC. In fact, the industry is evolving so fast that API management solutions in their traditional sense, like API gateways, can already be considered IT legacy products.

In a sense, API security has long become an industry of its own; with the scope of risks and challenges the industry confronts growing exponentially, API security solutions have to expand their coverage and grow in complexity themselves. Providing comprehensive protection against the broad range of API-specific threats and doing it consistently throughout the whole lifecycle of an API is complex. In this session, the results of our latest market research will be presented, helping you to understand the critical capabilities and to select the right solution for your specific problems and requirements.