It’s no wonder security teams struggle – they are outnumbered 100 to 1 by their developer counterparts. This gap is only being widened with the rise of AI and LLMs, with code assistants helping developers ship code 200% faster.

And here’s the thing: The solutions our AppSec teams have today are based on legacy technology that has yet to evolve to a shift-left, proactive approach. With thousands of applications pushed to production daily – a rate we all know isn’t slowing down anytime soon – monitoring for security vulnerabilities in production is already too late.

Organizations need to boost their security tooling in a way that makes sense for both AppSec teams and developers to work faster while eliminating potential roadblocks. When it comes to proactive API security, there are three critical pillars: API Discovery, API Security Testing, and API Oversight.

Pillar One: API Discovery

You can’t solve what you don’t know. In fact, 30% of repos today contain an application that should be tested but hasn’t been. Discovering APIs from an organization’s source code repository (GitHub, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket), is the safest and most efficient way to uncover hidden and unknown APIs. This gives security teams a view into their attack surface, while also connecting the dots between applications and APIs, the teams that own them and the rate of change.

Pillar Two: API Security Testing

Automated security testing is unfortunately still a distant concept for many enterprises. However, with the rise of cloud and microservices, legacy solutions that take the reactive approach of testing applications already in production are flawed. In today’s world, a proactive approach to identifying security threats with automated API security is critical and should be a shared responsibility between those who develop the application and the security team.

Pillar Three: API Oversight

Monitoring the overall health of your organization’s security program manually with spreadsheets, or utilizing solutions that solve for a small portion of the job, can be a time-consuming and inefficient process. To scale, security teams need solutions that provide actionable insights and a high-level view of their entire API security program. The ability to aggregate key security data across all applications to see the bigger picture equips security teams to proactively respond and share insights into the health of their security program — including with members of the Board.

A full end-to-end security program doesn’t start or stop with one-off tooling. The three pillars of shift-left API security offer the most comprehensive and proactive approach to scaling an API security program.