Building an API First Strategy for Security Integrations

Historically, security operations centers (SOCs) struggled to gather enough data to gain visibility into their environments. To gain insights, they connected more security tools, growing their cybersecurity technology stacks into behemoths, creating an entirely different challenge. 

Today, SOCs have access to vast quantities of data, yet they still lack insights because they have no way to connect the different tools or operationalize the information. Increasingly, organizations use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to integrate their security tools and build a single hub of security management, like with a security information and event management (SIEM) tool. In conjunction with these single sources of security information, they also utilize data lakes to cost-effectively store the data. As customers change their security data collection and storage capabilities, they increasingly need integrations across their sea of tools. 

To achieve their security objectives, many customers are adopting an API-first approach to security telemetry and monitoring, seeking vendors that have built-in integrations. Security vendors who want to remain competitive must align their technology offerings with customer API-first strategies to achieve their revenue outcomes. 

What is API-first?

API-first is an approach that prioritizes developing APIs as a core functionality of an application. This design approach emphasizes creating comprehensive API specifications and documentation to support the development team, enabling them to align the API with client application and user interface requirements. 

The key components of an API-first strategy include:

• API design: Initial development stage focuses on the API definition. 
• API specification: Detailed documentation outlines the API’s functionalities. 
• API management: Maintenance includes ongoing API service governance and optimization. 

Why is API-first popular today?

Over the past few years, API-first approaches to development have become increasingly popular among business-level applications, as they enable organizations to remain agile and responsive to market needs. 

Reduce Costs and Time to Market

By establishing a strong API contract, development teams can work in parallel, improving efficiency by simultaneously developing back-end services and client applications.  These contracts outline information like:

• API’s expected behavior.
• Data formats.
• Authorization and authentication processes.
• Error handling. 
• Limitations. 

Additionally, API mocking enables developers to simulate endpoint functionalities and test integrations, allowing them to mitigate errors earlier in the development lifecycle. 

Security Vendor Challenges: Diverse and Proprietary Data Formats

For business applications, API contracts often use pre-existing specifications and their data format schemas, like OpenAPI or GraphSQL. For security vendors, these specifications fail to respond to the unique challenges around the diverse data formats that security solutions use, including:

• Syslog
• JSON
• XML
• Vendor specific formats, like Palo Alto, Cisco, Microsoft Windows Event logs

Additionally, many security vendors struggle to implement simulated environments for API mocking that allow the rapid testing an API-first strategy requires. 

Reduce Application Failure Risks

Starting with detailed API design and documentation reduces application failure risk by ensuring that client applications and user interfaces function seamlessly. Further, consistent data models and response formats across various services minimizes potential failure related to discrepancies.

Security Vendor Challenges: Dynamic Schemas

Unlike business applications where schemas are stable and predictable, security solutions respond to new threats and risks, meaning that their API schemas change. Security APIs require more flexibility to ensure continued uptime and must be able to respond to:

• New fields
• Changes to field names
• Updates to the log structure

Improved Developer Experience (DX)

An API-first strategy fosters a better developer experience. By starting with a clear API specification, developers gain a better understanding of how to build their applications, enabling more efficient workflows. With well-structured API documentation, they can integrate and adapt applications more rapidly. 

Security Vendor Challenges: Data Security and Privacy

Creating a consistent, generic specification for security solutions is often difficult because the technologies generate highly sensitive information that can include:

• IP addresses
• Hostnames
• User credentials

To protect this data, the APIs often need to return vague error messages, making debugging and testing a challenge for developers.

What are the Advantages of API-First Development for Security Vendors?

By defining the API specification, including data models and response formats, before designing and creating the user interface or application code, organizations have a clear API contract to guide the API lifecycle. Some of the benefits that an API-first development strategy provides are:

• Scalable systems: Clearly defined API endpoints and specifications as a core functionality enable systems to scale with user demand without impacting the whole security architecture. 
• Flexibility for upgrading and updating systems: Stable APIs allow client applications and internal systems to evolve independently so that the security tool can introduce new features or update existing ones without disrupting customers’ security monitoring. 
• Lowered development costs and faster time to market: Clearly defining API specifications early in the development processes reduces ambiguity and enables collaboration that leads to less time spent resolving integration issues. 
• Activate data and inject intelligence into security monitoring: API-first design facilitates integration across various security tools so that SOCs can leverage real-time data for improved incident detection and response capabilities. 

Benefits of Adopting the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) for API-First Strategies

While the OCSF is not an API specification in the traditional sense, it provides security vendors with a way to represent security telemetry and alert data consistently. The OCSF standardizes the way data looks while the specification tells the API how to interact. By standardizing data formats, security vendors make their APIs more developer-friendly and interoperable. 

Standardized Event Formats

The OCSF standardizes security event field names and values, eliminating the challenges arising from disparate and proprietary data formats. When security vendors normalize data to OCSF, customers no longer need to write custom parsers for their APIs.

Interoperability

As customers add new security solutions, they want to integrate them with their existing tools. By standardizing they data formats, the tools can exchange data without custom mappings, enabling interoperability across security and IT investments, like:

• Security event management
• Ticketing and notification
• Vulnerability management
• Data Storage
• Identity management
• Endpoint security
• Network security
• Cloud security 
• Asset management
• Email security

Improved Customer Experience

When security vendors use the OCSF, customers’ developers only need to learn a single schema that they can reuse across various tools. A standardized schema means that developers no longer need to have deep knowledge about security data schemas, reducing customer costs and improving the customer’s time to value. Further, developers can more easily build integrations across different security solutions so that SOCs can leverage analytics and gain true insights. 

Synqly: Enabling an API-First Approach with Adaptive Data Mapping

Synqly Adaptive Data Mapping provides a highly configurable, schema-based mapping framework that security vendors can align to standards like the OCSF or fully customize, enabling their solutions to meet customer API-first strategy needs. Using Synqly’s Unified API, security vendors can reduce the operational overhead and improve responsiveness to deliver integrations at scale. Synqly is the first integration platform purpose-built for security IT Ops, and managed service vendors that allows them to build rapid, seamless integrations while reducing development costs and complexity by up to 90%. 

To learn how Synqly solves the cybersecurity integration burden, contact us today to schedule a demo.