This is our third year evaluating the API functional automated testing solutions space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 14 of the top API functional automated testing solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading API functional automated testing solutions offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

The post GigaOm Radar for API Functional Automated Testing appeared first on Gigaom.

The importance of this technology cannot be overstated in today’s interconnected digital landscape. As organizations increasingly rely on web applications and APIs to conduct business, share data, and provide services, they face growing security challenges.

Application and API security solutions address these challenges by protecting against vulnerabilities, detecting and preventing attacks, and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations. The benefits include reduced risk of data breaches, improved customer trust, and the ability to rapidly deploy and scale digital services without compromising security.

This technology is crucial for a wide range of stakeholders. Development teams rely on it to build secure applications; operations teams use it to maintain the safety of deployed services; and security teams depend on it for threat detection and response. Additionally, business leaders and compliance officers value these solutions for their role in risk management and regulatory compliance.

The market for application and API security is evolving rapidly. Year over year, we’re seeing a shift toward more integrated AI-driven solutions that can keep pace with the increasing sophistication of cyberthreats. Customers are demanding more automated, real-time protection capabilities, and vendors are responding by incorporating advanced technologies like machine learning and behavioral analytics into their offerings.

In terms of market maturity, we’re observing a diverse landscape. While some organizations are still in the early stages of adopting comprehensive application and API security measures, others are quite advanced in their implementations. Similarly, vendor offerings range from relatively new, specialized tools to mature, full-featured platforms.

The overall trend is toward the maturation of capabilities, with vendors focusing on enhancing existing features and improving integration with broader security ecosystems.

The vendor landscape in this space is diverse. Some solutions have evolved from related areas such as web application firewalls or API management platforms, gradually expanding their security capabilities. Others have been purpose-built from the ground up to address the specific challenges of application and API security. Many vendors are now taking a holistic approach, offering comprehensive suites that cover the entire application lifecycle from development to deployment and ongoing protection.

For this report, we focus on solutions that provide comprehensive protection for both applications and APIs, covering aspects such as vulnerability detection, threat intelligence, bot management, and real-time attack prevention. We exclude point solutions that address only a single aspect of application or API security. Our inclusion criteria prioritize vendors that offer AI-enhanced capabilities, advanced threat intelligence, and robust integration with broader security ecosystems, as these features represent the cutting edge of the market and address the most pressing current and emerging security challenges.

This is our fourth year evaluating the application and API security solutions space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 16 of the top application and API security solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading application and API security solutions offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

The post GigaOm Radar for Application & API Security appeared first on Gigaom.

The rising importance of API security cannot be overstated. As organizations increasingly rely on APIs to power their digital ecosystems, these interfaces have become prime targets for malicious actors. A single compromised API can lead to devastating consequences, including data breaches, service disruptions, and reputational damage. Moreover, increasingly, APIs must comply with many regulatory and legal requirements. API security solutions address these risks by providing behavioral analysis, code scanning, input and output payload inspection, rate throttling, and analytics and reporting to ensure that only legitimate users and applications can access sensitive data and functionality.

API security matters to a diverse range of stakeholders across the organizational and technological landscape. Developers and DevOps teams are the prime targets of solutions that have a “shift left” approach, enabling these stakeholders to build secure APIs from the very beginning. IT and security teams depend on API security to maintain the integrity of their digital infrastructure. End users, though unaware, benefit from the enhanced protection of their personal data and the improved reliability and availability of the services they use.

From a CxO perspective, investing in API security solutions is not just a technical necessity but a critical business imperative. In an era where data is often described as the new oil, protecting the pipelines that transport this valuable resource is paramount. API breaches can result in significant financial losses, both from immediate remediation costs and long-term impacts on customer trust and market position. Moreover, with the increasing regulatory focus on data protection and privacy (for example, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA), organizations face severe penalties for failing to adequately secure their data flows.

API security solutions offer a proactive approach to risk management, allowing organizations to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. This not only reduces the likelihood of costly breaches but also demonstrates a commitment to security that can be a powerful differentiator in the market. For CxOs looking to drive digital transformation initiatives, robust API security is an enabler of innovation, providing the confidence to rapidly develop and deploy new services without compromising on safety.

This is our third year evaluating the API security space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 13 of the top API security solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading API security offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

The post GigaOm Radar for API Security appeared first on Gigaom.

But then a new challenge arrived, prompting a seismic shift for this state of equilibrium: modern cloud workloads and generative AI.

Both of these workloads demand high performance and low latency and are more typically suited to network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) environments. However, the scalability required to store millions, potentially billions, of files with detailed enriched metadata helped to position object storage as the preferred destination.

Over the last few years, companies have gained a mature understanding of building modern cloud architectures at scale using native cloud services such as Amazon S3, and are now looking to bring these capabilities to their own hybrid clouds. This created a demand for S3-compatible object storage combined with data management in a broader range of environments, including on-premises, at the edge, within containerized environments, and within the public cloud providers themselves. This is the backbone of providing application and data portability and a major imperative for companies to consider when assessing their options for hosting unstructured data.

Arise All-Flash Architectures

The primary responses to these new performance demands were the addition of flash to existing vendors’ storage offerings and the launch of all-flash, NVMe-based offerings from new challengers in the market. These impressive innovations helped drive greater adoption of object storage across AI/ML and data lake environments.

Fast Isn’t Everything

Going fast is certainly important; however, the top vendors in this space were also able to apply enterprise management capabilities to these new architectures, including replication, ransomware protection, full S3 protocol compatibility, and robust partner certifications to ensure compatibility with existing customer investments. Some vendors now even offer certifications in ML. One example is PyTorch, which is one of the leading frameworks for developing and training ML models.

Object Storage Solutions

While vendors reacted with new architectures, customer demands have placed an emphasis on additional data management capabilities in order to reduce the overall costs of higher-performance hardware.

It’s true that not all data needs to go fast all the time. In fact, it’s common for data that demanded higher performance earlier in its lifecycle to be accessed less frequently as it ages. Vendors offering automatic storage optimization based on data access profiling can enable the movement of this data to more commercially viable tiers, freeing up performant hardware for newer, high-value data without losing the manageability of those objects within a single namespace. Many vendors now support extending these storage tiers to public cloud providers, so customers can benefit from both performance and cloud-scale capacity within a single management plane.

As object storage is used for a growing number of mission-critical applications, ransomware protection at the storage layer is increasingly important. Vendors investing in these innovations are well-placed to satisfy these requirements for the year ahead.

With so many vendors in this space, I recommend that prospective customers develop a clear understanding of their business requirements for unstructured data and, more importantly, the differences in the way vendors implement their features and architectures for object storage.

Next Steps

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s object storage Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

• GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Object Storage Solutions
• GigaOm Radar for Object Storage

If you’re not yet a GigaOm subscriber, sign up here.

The post The Rapidly Changing Landscape of Enterprise Object Storage appeared first on Gigaom.

In most organizations, public-facing APIs have become a larger attack surface than regular interactive web pages, and with applications spanning multiple cloud vendors and the data center, perhaps even including a hosting provider, the number of publicly accessible APIs is growing exponentially. Add to that the growth of microservices architecture, and it’s clear there’s a big risk that must be managed. API security solutions are among the primary methods of limiting that risk.

While not entirely new, this space is only recently coming to market prominence as organizations begin to realize how many APIs they rely on that may or may not be protected by existing infrastructure. In fact, many organizations don’t know how many APIs they have running, let alone whether or in what ways those APIs are protected.

This realization and new interest has led to an increase in vendors offering a variety of solutions that prospective customers should consider to increase their API security posture.

This technology space is aimed specifically at protecting APIs, not at protecting applications. For organizations that are just starting to get their security infrastructure up and running—who do not have a web application firewall (WAF) or data loss prevention (DLP) strategy—our 2023 application and API security Key Criteria report will be worth a read. For those who are comfortable with the level of protection their WAF provides, this report covers the API-specific functionality that WAF is missing.

Business Imperative
From a business perspective, ensuring robust API security is critical for several reasons:

• Protecting sensitive data: APIs often handle sensitive information such as customer data, financial details, and proprietary information. Ensuring these APIs are secure helps to protect this data from breaches and leaks, which can have severe financial and reputational consequences.
• Maintaining trust: Customers and partners expect their data to be handled securely. A breach can erode this trust and damage the brand’s reputation, leading to loss of customers and potential partners.
• Regulatory compliance: Many industries are subject to strict regulations regarding data protection and privacy (such as GDPR and CCPA). Secure APIs help ensure compliance with these regulations, avoiding hefty fines and legal issues.
• Operational continuity: A security breach can disrupt operations, leading to downtime and loss of productivity.
• Competitive advantage: In today’s competitive environments, having strong security measures can be a differentiator.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of an API security solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of an API security solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that an API security solution is an important priority for businesses to consider when planning and implementing their overall cybersecurity strategy.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for API security are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.