According to the State of CIO Survey 2023, 85% of CIOs say their role continues to be more digital and innovation-focused. The study also reported that this has enhanced CIOs’ stature, increasingly positioning them as strategic advisors and critical consultants to the business. Alongside these changes, CIOs still hold the ultimate responsibility for balancing rapid innovation and progress with business protection.
Subsequently, it’s not surprising that the study also found that security continues to be one of the top priorities for CIOs. In fact, the survey showed that nearly a third of CIOs identified IT and data security as a top priority, just behind strengthened IT and business collaboration at 30%.
Digitalization has brought new and unique revenue-generating opportunities across multiple industries – from financial services to ecommerce to insurance to healthcare and many others. However, to capitalize on these online business investments and services, they must be protected.
APIs represent the entry point into a company’s most critical data
Because APIs enable digitalization, APIs provide a key entry point into a company’s – and its customers’ – most valuable data and sensitive information. This makes API threats a critical point of vulnerability and API security essential to the strategic survival of a business.
As most companies are still on their cloud and digital transformation journeys, they continue to build APIs at a rapid pace, to enable these massive changes. A critical application building block and data sharing mechanism that helps companies move faster, APIs have become pervasive in digital environments. Yet many businesses don’t even know how many APIs they have, much less whether they’re exposing sensitive data or sharing too much. Without even an accurate inventory, the enterprise is at risk.
Today’s digital cloud security depends on API security. This enormous dependency means API security is a business, and therefore a CIO, problem – not just a CISO or security problem. IT best practices always start with asset management. After all, you can’t manage what you don’t see. Then, after you have visibility into those assets, you need to protect them.
Since APIs are expressly created to share critical information, they make a lucrative and attractive target for attackers. CIOs must understand the API landscape to help the company reduce risk. By building a strong strategy around API security, a CIO can help the company keep moving fast and focus on innovation.
API sprawl increases security risks
As API usage continues to rise, the resulting API sprawl makes it nearly impossible to stay up to date on new and changed APIs, as well as where APIs could be exposing sensitive data. The Salt Labs State of API Security Report found that the average number of APIs per customer grew 82% from July 2021 to July 2022. The sheer number of APIs organizations now manage, along with the variety of ways software gets released in a company, makes it difficult to keep track – that same report found that 53% of respondents identified API sprawl as their greatest API security concern.
Lack of API governance can miss abuse
CIOs play an important role in facilitating cross-functional collaboration across development and security teams. To avoid control gaps when it comes to the application landscape, CIOs need a strong governance strategy for APIs.
CIOs must establish a governance program that prioritizes API inventory assessment, so that the business has an accurate list of APIs running in the infrastructure. Most organizations have a significant percentage of so-called “shadow APIs” – those APIs that aren’t documented or mediated in API governance platforms. The next step is to understand the risk associated with those APIs and be able to continuously monitor them in runtime for abuse.
CIOs – adopting API protection to accelerate digital initiatives
CIOs are shouldering more responsibilities – and risk. Digitalization has transformed the role of the CIO. To protect digital initiatives, CIOs need to have processes in place able to continuously and fully discover all existing APIs within the infrastructure. Moreover, they need to ensure the APIs running in production have real-time security protection in place, so that threats can be identified and stopped. By doing so, CIOs can accelerate initiatives focused on protecting the business, which is everyone’s end goal.
