The importance of API security
To demonstrate why API security matters, let’s start with a simple but deeply concerning stat: 99% of businesses have experienced API security issues. Since APIs are the glue that holds complex and distributed cloud environments together, solving these security problems is paramount.
But businesses are up against sophisticated threats. Malicious actors see APIs as prime attack vectors for data breaches, and the fact that many businesses don’t get API security spot-on only makes matters worse. Without strong security, API vulnerabilities like overprivileged access, poor authentication mechanisms, a lack of monitoring, and misconfigured endpoints often get exploited. (For a deeper dive, check out OWASP’s list of API risks that could lead to data exposure, excessive access and administrative privileges, and the exchange of data with unknown systems.)
API vulnerabilities aren’t just application flaws—they’re entry points into your cloud attack surface. Addressing API security holistically reduces breach risk, data exposure, and compliance gaps across the entire cloud lifecycle—from code to production runtime.
In this article, we’ll break down what capabilities a strong API security tool needs to have and look at different categories of API security solutions, plus examples. Most importantly, we’ll give you all the information and guidance you need to decide what API security solution is best for your organization.
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API security tools: Core strengths and must-haves
Now that you’re up to speed on the importance of API security, let’s take a look at some must-have features. We’ll explore three key categories: discovery and visibility, risk detection, and actionability and integration.
Discovery and visibility
Discovery and Visibility: Automated discovery eliminates blind spots by identifying every API across workloads, containers, serverless environments, and API gateways—including undocumented and shadow APIs. Advanced API security includes contextualizing discovery—linking APIs to sensitive data, identity risk, and external exposure.
Runtime behavior analysis goes beyond static scans to monitor live traffic and behaviors, surfacing enumeration attempts, credential stuffing, and abuse in production environments. This helps teams maintain a continuously accurate API inventory while proactively catching threats as they emerge.
Risk detection
Sensitive Data Detection: Scans API requests and responses to identify exposure of PII, PCI, secrets, and internal data, reducing the risk of accidental data leaks and compliance violations.
Authentication and Authorization Analysis: Continuously audits auth misconfigurations, missing authentication, weak tokens, and inconsistent schemes, helping eliminate unauthenticated API exposures before they’re exploited.
Anomaly Detection: Monitors API traffic to flag deviations from expected behaviors, identifying abuse, bot activity, or malicious exploitation attempts in real time—especially useful for catching drift in production.
Actionability and integration
Risk Prioritization with Cloud Context: Combines API-level findings with cloud workload context, identifying toxic combinations like public + unauthenticated + sensitive data. This helps prioritize the riskiest exposures while filtering out noise.
CI/CD Integration: Enforces security earlier in the pipeline, integrating with CI/CD tools for OpenAPI validation, IaC scanning, and secure deployment gates—helping prevent API misconfigurations from ever reaching production.
Compliance and Governance Reporting: Provides audit-ready inventory and security posture reports that map API ownership, exposure levels, and sensitive data handling—critical for demonstrating compliance with frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.
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Top API security tools and platforms
The API security industry is on a serious growth trajectory—the market is on pace to reach $3 billion by 2028 at an annual rate of 32.5% between 2023 and 2029. In other words, you’re going to have a lot of options to choose from. To keep it simple, we’ve organized our list of top tools and platforms by type so you can see what might work best for you:
Dedicated API security platforms
These are security platforms purpose-built and designed to exclusively deal with API vulnerabilities and security risks. They typically offer advanced features that all-in-one solutions may not have, but the trade-off is that you’ll need to add in tools for other aspects of cloud security.
Here are a few leading standalone API security tools:
Salt Security: An end-to-end API security solution featuring capabilities like behavioral analysis and context-driven attack detection
Noname (now Akamai) Security: An API security platform that offers broad discovery, runtime posture management, and automated API security testing features
42Crunch: A comprehensive and automation-driven API security platform with a focus on design-time and shift-left security via OpenAPI enforcement
Cequence Security: An API security management solution that combines bot detection and API abuse protection to prevent API-centric attacks and fraud
However, these point solutions typically lack cloud workload context and code-to-cloud visibility, making it harder for security teams to understand how API risks connect to broader cloud exposures or to empower developers to fix issues earlier in the lifecycle.
Cloud native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) with API security
Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) provide unified security across cloud posture, workloads, and identities—and many now include baseline API security features. However, CNAPP capabilities vary significantly. Some focus on basic discovery and posture checks, while others, go further by unifying API security and cloud security in a single platform.
Here are some leading CNAPPs that are equipped with built-in API security tools:
Wiz: Combines API security, cloud posture management, and shift-left controls in a single platform. Agentless API discovery, runtime validation, and dynamic scanner reduce unknown API exposure, while shift-left IDE integrations and CI/CD guardrails prevent API risks from reaching production. Code-to-cloud correlation enables fast remediation of API risks identified in runtime.
Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks: A CNAPP solution offering an API security component with capabilities like API discovery and posture scanning alongside broader cloud workload protection
Lacework: A unified, AI-powered CNAPP that focuses on anomaly detection at the behavioral level, including for APIs
API gateway–integrated tools
These tools are security mechanisms that are built into API management gateways. Think of it as out-of-the-box protections, a first line of defense that comes with API gateways.
A few things to remember about API gateway–integrated solutions: While they reduce the technical complexity of unifying additional tools, built-in API security solutions don't have advanced API security features or guaranteed cross-cloud compatibility.
Here are a few strong gateway-integrated API security tools:
AWS API Gateway/WAF: An API and web application firewall (WAF) with capabilities like basic rate limiting and access controls; typically, it needs to be a part of a larger security tool stack
Azure API Management: An API management service with features like policy-based access enforcement and strong integration with Microsoft Defender
Apigee: A Google Cloud API management tool that offers features like API security, lifecycle management, and analytics
Kong: An API gateway and service mesh with gateway-native authentication, rate limiting, and routing features
NGINX: An API gateway with capabilities like API authentication, authorization, visibility, and security
That said, gateway-integrated tools primarily focus on surface-level protections like rate limiting and authentication, but often lack runtime attack path analysis, toxic combination detection, and shift-left enforcement—capabilities critical for reducing real-world cloud API risks.
How to choose the right API security solution
Choosing the right API security solution depends on how well it reduces your cloud attack surface, connects APIs to real risk context, and streamlines remediation across security and development teams.
When making a decision, use these questions to figure out what tooling works best for you:
Does your organization have many microservices or internal teams deploying APIs independently? If so, look for solutions with strong discovery, shadow API detection, and ownership tracking.
Are your teams focusing on cloud attack surface reduction? Choose platforms that correlate exposure, sensitive data, and identity risk if you’re working on reducing your attack surface.
Need help staying compliant with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS? Look for solutions with audit-ready inventory and data classification capabilities when regulatory compliance is a priority.
Is your organization committed to DevSecOps initiatives and shift-left methodologies? Consider tools that enforce security at the spec level and click straight into CI/CD pipelines if you’re emphasizing DevSecOps and shifting left.
Do more than one or all of these questions describe your situation? If so, consider commissioning a comprehensive CNAPP that mixes advanced API security capabilities with a wider suite of cloud security features like CSPM, DSPM, AI-SPM, CIEM, and vulnerability management.
How Wiz helps secure APIs in context
Wiz delivers agentless API discovery and contextual risk analysis across your entire cloud, helping teams find, prioritize, and secure the APIs that matter most. Unlike siloed tools, Wiz connects APIs to their runtime environments, exposed identities, and data risk, so you can detect toxic combinations like public + unauthenticated + PII with high precision.
Wiz unifies API security and cloud security in a single platform, delivering:
Full API visibility: Agentless discovery + runtime telemetry (via the Wiz Sensor) captures shadow, unmanaged, and zombie APIs.
Contextual risk prioritization: Focus on toxic combinations (e.g., public + unauthenticated + sensitive data), not just vulnerabilities.
Shift-left security: Identify risks in code, add guardrails in CI/CD, and trace issues back to dev teams.
Attack path reduction: Visualize how APIs connect to data and workloads, closing breach pathways faster.
Unified workflows: Break down silos—security and dev teams collaborate via code-to-cloud correlation.
The secret sauce that drives Wiz’s API security capabilities? The Dynamic Scanner, which allows teams to continuously find and map internet-facing APIs, identify public exposure, find unauthenticated APIs, help prune down the API attack surface, and send alerts to catch and remediate noncompliant APIs.
Ready to learn more? Get a demo today to see Wiz’s API security capabilities in action.
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