Tech Trend - API Security - Sierra Ventures Blog

5 Areas to Watch: Part 3

As early-stage technology investors, we see a wide range of companies working on game-changing businesses. This 5 Part Blog Series shares what our firm has been most intrigued by within the early-stage Enterprise B2B IT Infrastructure space in the first half of 2019.Trends we noticed led to the 5 Areas to Watch which we’ll cover in this 5 Part Series:

• Part 1: Privacy Operations Infrastructure (PrivOps)
• Part 2: Kubernetes Management
• Part 3: API Security
• Part 4: Developer Led B2Bi Infrastructure (3rd-Gen Data Flow/ Integration Tools)
• Part 5: Intelligent Enterprise Applications

API SecurityMost APIs are designed to be easy to use, while also helping with data integration and access to drive business value. Also, their use is becoming more widespread, with 73% of organizations using APIs in some form. This gives attackers another inroad to go after data that is most valuable and will result in more breaches. API based threats will surely become a top threat vector that CISOs care about in the next few years. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2022, API abuses will be the most frequent attack vector resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications. The following 3 trends explain why:

1. The enterprise is REST-ified and everything is now services-based architecture. Ingress egress points are now spread out. The number of threat vectors have grown dramatically.
2. Increased consumption of 3rd party APIs means CISOs don’t have visibility into all services touching their infrastructure.
3. The amount of data within data centers is exploding. Organizations need to think about east west traffic solutions as well as north south

Sierra is still watching this space closely and we would love to meet teams innovating in this area.Resources:

• https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/6-best-practices-for-creating-a-container-platform-strategy/