Application development has shifted and grown with the rapid adoption of cloud based environments. As the name suggests, web applications are programs that are accessible to users via a web browser. They are an invaluable part of an organization’s web presence. Often, this presence incorporates application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow programmatic access to an organization’s web applications or underlying services for the application.
Unsurprisingly, these web applications and web APIs are a common target of cyber criminals.The growing threat is made more dangerous by the adoption of services in the cloud required to build such applications. Cloud web application and API protection (WAAP) services are the evolution of cloud web application firewall services to meet these new challenges.
Traditional solutions are rule based—they analyze every request in isolation and compare them to manually set rules. The problem with this approach lies in the fast pace of application development. The very same reason developers are drawn to cloud based web application systems is what creates a growing attack surface. Applications are evolving faster than ever – creating and exposing more APIs.
