More Investment In API Security

I’m getting some investment from ElasticBeam to turn up the volume on my API security research, so I will be telling more stories on the subject, and publishing an industry guide, as well as a white paper in coming weeks. I want my API security to become a first class area of my API research, along side definitions, design, deployment, management, monitoring, testing, and performance.

Much of my API security research is built on top of OWASP’s hard work, but honestly I haven’t gotten very far along in it. I’ve managed to curated a handful of companies who I’ve come across in my research, but haven’t had time to dive in deeper, or fully process all the news I’ve curated there. It takes time to stay in tune with what companies are up to, and I’m thankful for ElasticBeam’s investment to help me pay the bills while I’m heads down doing this work.

I am hoping that my API security research will also help encourage you to invest more into API security. As I do with my other partners, I will find ways of weaving ElasticBeam into the conversation, but my stories, guides, and white papers will be about the wider space–which Elastic Beam fits in. I’m hoping they’ll compliment Runscope as my partner when it comes to monitoring, testing, and performance (see how I did that, I worked Runscope in too), adding the security dimension to these critical layers of operating a reliable API.

One thing that attracted me to conversations with ElasticBeam was that they were developing a solution that could augment existing API management solutions like 3Scale and Amazon Web Services. I’ll have a talk with the team about integrating with Tyk, DreamFactory, and Restlet–my other partners. Damn I’m good. I got them all in here! Seriously though, I’m thankful for these partners investing in what I do, and helping me tell more stories on the blog, and produce more guides and papers.

I feel like 3Scale has long represented what I’ve been doing over seven years–a focus on API management. Restlet, DreamFactory, and Tyk represent the maturing and evolution of this layer. While Runscope really reflects the awareness that has been generated at the API management layer, but evolving to serve not just API providers, but also API consumers. I feel like ElasticBeam reflects the next critical piece of the puzzle, moving the API security conversation beyond the authentication and rate limiting of API management, or limiting the known threats, and making it about identifying the unknown threats our API infrastructure faces today.