The Hidden Costs of Outsourcing Security API Development

Corporate IT environments occupy a significant amount of digital real estate, providing attackers with numerous opportunities to achieve their objectives. As security teams continue to identify and close monitoring and visibility gaps, security vendors strive to introduce new solutions to the market in response to emerging threats. As security teams adopt new technologies, they expand their digital footprint, with most organizations utilizing 70 to 130 distinct tools. 

For security vendors, having the coolest, shiniest, newest technology is no longer the primary differentiator. Security teams need your solution to fit into their security stack. Otherwise, you become just another technology in an overcrowded market. 

As a security vendor, developing an effective integration strategy is crucial to achieving your revenue goals. However, if you plan to outsource integration development, consider the upfront and hidden costs associated with it. 

What Are the Benefits of Custom APIs?

Just like no man is an island, no security vendor is a comprehensive, single pane of glass that eliminates the security analyst’s swivel chair. 

With custom APIs, you can create a market advantage that drives customer satisfaction and revenue. When you tell your customers that your solution enables “holistic visibility” across a “complex IT and security stack,” you admit that your technology needs to augment or support other security tools. 

At a very high level, building a custom API to integrate into your customers’ overarching security stack provides benefits like:

• Controlling the data that your solution generates and sends to a customer’s security information and event management (SIEM) solution. 
• Improving customer satisfaction by enabling them to optimize your solution’s value rapidly. 
• Proving you understand customer needs, including how your solution’s monitoring data complements or augments other security telemetry. 
• Building partner relationships that support your long-term business goals. 

What Are the Costs Associated with Building One API Integration?

Building an API can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000, depending on the integration’s complexity. For security vendors, that word complexity is critical because security technology APIs begin with general requirements for all integrations and then introduce their own unique challenges that drive up costs. 

For the following analysis, the outsourced web developers building the API charge an average hourly rate of $61 to $80. 

Defining Requirements: $1200 to $1600

Before you begin building the integration, you need to define the project’s scope and the API’s use cases. As part of this process, you need to:

• Identify core functionalities.
• Determine data types and formats. 
• Assess compatibility needs and potential issues
• Define outcomes and key performance indicators. 
• Detail security and compliance requirements. 

Time estimate: 20 hours

Database Design: $1920 – $2560

Database design tells the API how to ask for what it needs. Typically, this process defines the data’s structure and schema to:

• Reduce bugs
• Enable scalability
• Improve maintenance

For example, a typical business-level API uses:

• JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
• XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
• Form-Encoded (application/x-www-form-urlencoded)

Time estimate: 32 hours

Research: $1920 – $2560

To build the API around your requirements, the developers usually engage in research that can include:

• Understanding the problem the API solves, data it sends/receives, and end-user workflows
• Determining whether existing APIs or standards exist to prevent inconsistencies. 
• Insight into the endpoints, request and response formats, naming conventions, and versioning. 
• Exploring the authentication and security models, like whether it uses API keys, OAuth2, JWTs, or session tokens as well as how it handles roles, permissions, and access controls. 
• Researching backend systems and data models, including databases, services, and legacy systems and whether they expose the necessary data.
• Exploiting documents and tools, like SDKs, client libraries, or API gateways. 

Time estimate: 32 hours

Developing the Prototype: $2400 – $3200

Once all the initial work is completed, the developers can start working on the API’s “first draft.” This process includes activities like:

• Planning routes and payloads: Defining HTTP methods, routes, and request and response formats. 
• Creating a basic environment: Choosing the language and framework, deploying a lightweight server, and testing requests.
• Using mock data: Storing data in a simple variable to test flows without connecting to the real database.
• Building a minimum viable product (MVP): Coding necessary routes to see how they work. 
• Testing: Using common cases to test that requests and responses work as intended.

Time estimate: 40 hours

Writing Documentation: $2880 – $3840

THe API documentation tells end-users how the API functions and how to use it. This process includes activities like:

• Documenting structure: Base URL, HTTP methods, endpoint paths. 
• Explaining requests: Required parameters, headers, request body structure, authentication/authorization required. 
• Describing responses: Status codes, response body examples, field descriptions. 
• Listing possible errors: What causes errors, what responses look like, how to resolve errors.
• Explaining authentication: Defining how authentication works and when tokens expire or require refreshing.
• Creating a quick-start guide: Explaining where to get API keys, first calls to make, and initial request/responses.
• Providing references: Defining the versioning strategy, documenting deprecated endpoints, and linking to SDKs or libraries

Time estimate: 48 hours

Security Testing: $4800- $6400

Since APIs transmit sensitive information, attackers target them. Your customers are increasingly worried about API security, and, as a security vendor, they have high expectations for your ability to protect sensitive data. Simultaneously, your technology generates and transmits important information about customer environments, making attackers even more fierce. Testing your API security is even more critical to your reputation than for a traditional business-level application. 

This process includes activities like testing:

• Authentication: Ensuring only valid users or systems can access the API.
• Authorization: Ensuring users can only access what they need to complete job functions. 
• Data validation and input sanitization: Ensuring the API handles all inputs safely, including different types, ranges, and formats to mitigate risks like SQL injections and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
• Rate limiting and throttling: Limiting the number of calls made to an endpoint to mitigate brute-force login and API key guessing risks. 
• Error handling: Ensuring that error messages are consistent and secure by not leaking sensitive information, like stack traces, system paths, or internal logic.
• Sensitive data exposure: Transmitting data over encrypted HTTPS and preventing secrets from being logged or echoed to protect data, like passwords or tokens. 
• Endpoint enumeration and discovery: Ensuring that undocumented or admin-only endpoints are not exposed by looking for hidden routes via fuzzing or error messages and ensuring that deprecated and test endpoints are no longer active. 
• Logging and monitoring: Ensuring the API appropriately records and alerts users about suspicious activities, like failed logins, abuse patterns, authentication failures.

Time estimate: 80 hours

Building Monitoring Dashboards: $1440 – $1920

Once the developers complete building the integration, you need them to create monitoring dashboards that give you real-time visibility into API performance, security, and use. As a security vendor, your customers rely on your technology to ensure their controls work effectively. If your API has performance issues or experiences a disruption, this can ultimately impact their ability to detect an incident. 

This process includes activities like:

• Defining availability and uptime metrics: Response time trends, health check responses.
• Defining performance metrics: Latency, throughout, and endpoint speed.
• Defining errors for tracking: HTTPS status codes, top failing endpoints, and error rates over time. 
• Defining usage and traffic metrics: Most called endpoints, active users/API keys, geographic locations or IP addresses making the most calls. 
• Defining security monitoring metrics: Unauthorized requests, rate limit violations, unusual access patterns.
• Collecting API metrics and logs: Data sources, like API Gateway and load balancer logs, application logs, and APM/monitoring agent logs.
• Designing layout: Organization for different sections and how to represent them visually, like using charts, heatmaps, or tables. 
• Setting up alerts and thresholds: Alert types, like downtime thresholds, error rates allows, latency minimums, and traffic spikes 
• Validating with real traffic: Test environments for simulating load, triggering known errors, and ensuring that visualizations and alerts work as intended. 

Time estimate: 24 hours

Ongoing Monthly Maintenance Costs: $2700 – $3600

Once your integration is built, either you or the outsourced developer, needs to maintain it. You need to meet the service level agreement (SLA) terms defined in the contract and support customers’ ongoing use. 

On a monthly basis, you can expect to spend approximately 45 hours per month on various tasks:

• 12 hours: Fixing bugs and triaging issues: 
• 6 hours: Testing and quality assurance (QA) before releasing fixes
• 8 hours: Minor feature updates
• 5 hours: Security updates
• 4 hours: Performance tuning 
• 4 hours: Updating documents and SDKs
• 4 hours: Answering questions and helping users with the integration
• 2 hours: Checking dashboards and handling incidents

Total Cost Estimate

Based on these assumptions, the initial cost to build an API is an average of $16,560 – $22,080.

However, once you include the annual costs of maintaining the API, you’re looking at another $32,400 – $43,200 every year until you retire the integration. 

Even more costly, your customers want integrations into all the different tools across their security stack. For example, if you only need to integrate with SIEMs, you may need to build 20 or more APIs, one for each of the major players in the market. 

Now, instead of $16,560 – $22,080 to build the integration, you’re looking at an initial cost of $331,200 – $441,600.

Your annual maintenance costs multiply by that number, too, bringing your total annual costs to $648,000 – $864,000.

But wait… there’s more. 

Why Are Security APIs More Expensive than Typical Business Application Integrations?

The above cost estimate makes the generous assumption that you will find a developer who understands the quirks of security APIs at an average hourly rate. Realistically, for someone who has experience in the security world, you’re more likely looking at paying $150 – $300 per hour. 

Diverse Security Data Formats and Schemas

Unlike business-level APIs, security APIs require experience with a wider array of data formats and schemas. For example, security solutions may use a variety of formats, including:

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

As if this wasn’t complex enough, each schema comes with its own:

• Field names
• Structures
• Nesting

Only an experienced security developer understands these but even an experienced one may still need to figure out certain things, like proprietary formats. The more hours spent learning; the more the cost increases. 

Ultimately, these increase the costs of the following stages of API development:

• Defining requirements
• Database design
• Research
• Developing the prototype
• Writing the documentation
• Security testing

Dynamic Schemas

To a certain extent, APIs are fragile. When a developer updates a schema, the API can experience an outage which leads to customer dissatisfaction. While business APIs are fairly stable, security APIs are dynamic and require flexibility. For example, a security API can break when you:

• Adds new fields
• Changes field names
• Updates the entire log structure

When you update schemas, you increase the maintenance costs associated with:

• Identifying and triaging issues.
• Testing and QA before releasing fixes.
• Performance tuning
• Updating documents and SDKs.

Unique Compliance Requirements

For business applications, the sensitive data is fairly similar across the board, like:

• Names
• Birthdates
• Payment card information
• Social security numbers

However, security tools generate sensitive and dynamic information about a customer’s IT environment, including:

• IP addresses
• Hostnames
• User credentials

As part of your customers’ compliance posture, your APIs need to secure this data, and you need a developer who understands what it looks like in the logs and where attackers can find it in them. 

This increases the development and maintenance costs associated with:

• Security testing
• Building dashboards
• Ongoing maintenance activities

Total Cost Estimates for Security APIs

Taking the unique needs of security integrations under consideration, the need for a security-focused developer is clearer. Assuming the project stays within the initial scope and the integration requires only basic maintenance, you will be paying a premium for your integration that looks like: 

• $41,400 – $82,800 for the initial build 
• $81,000 – $162,000 in annual maintenance

To make this even more realistic, if you want to build out an integration for 20 different SIEMs, you’re looking at:

• $72,000 – $144,000: Initial build
• $1,620,000 – $3,240,000: Ongoing maintenance

Synqly: Build Once and Connect Infinitely for Reduced Costs and Improved Customer Outcomes

When you seek to outsource your integrations, your strategy becomes expensive and unwieldy. To complicate complex matters further, you may have customers who want a one-off integration for a legacy tool. Even with all your customer research, you will never be able to afford every integration that every customer wants, ultimately leading to lost sales. 

As the first AI-enabled, integration platform purpose-built for cybersecurity use cases, you can reduce integration costs, maintenance, and complexity by up to 90%. 

Synqly solves this problem for you. Our security-focused Unified API, integration platform solution was built by security professionals for security vendors. We built out a wide collection of integrations across key security technology categories, including:

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

Once you build an API into Synqly’s platform, your solution can natively connect with any of the technologies you and your customers need. Instead of building 20 different SIEM APIs, you can build one API into Synqly and connect your solution into an infinite number of SIEMs. 

Using Synqly’s abstraction layer, you eliminate the need to manage multiple APIs, enabling you rapid, seamless integrations across your customers’ cybersecurity and infrastructure ecosystems. Our continuous performance monitoring alleviates the financial and staffing burdens of maintaining the integrations, giving you back the resources necessary to improve your core product. 

Since we understand the unique requirements and data schemas that security integrations require, our ‘build once and connect all’ approach is akin to hiring an experienced security developer at a steep discount. Our easy-to-follow documentation means that even the less experienced developers on your team can build your connection with Synqly, allowing you to keep these activities in-house while reducing the burdens on your internal teams. 

Contact us today to see how to unlock the power of autonomous security with Synqly.