Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced the Cloudflare API Gateway, providing businesses a simple, fast, and effective way to protect and control all of their APIs (application programming interfaces). Organizations are using APIs more than ever before, yet many of them struggle to secure this traffic as legacy solutions are often expensive, overly complex, and slow. Cloudflare API Gateway will simplify the process of identifying, securing, and managing APIs of any protocol on one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks.

The world runs on APIs—our phones, smartwatches, banking systems, and shopping sites all rely on APIs to communicate—and API traffic generates more than 50% of all the HTTP requests on Cloudflare’s global network. With this explosive growth it has become more critical than ever for businesses of all sizes to have robust protection and a clear view of their API suite. According to Gartner[1]: “API security challenges have emerged as a top concern for most software engineering leaders, as unmanaged and unsecured APIs create vulnerabilities that could accelerate multimillion dollar security incidents.” However, traditional legacy solutions are often difficult to implement, expensive to run, and unreasonably slow. Now, Cloudflare API Gateway provides a single hub allowing businesses to quickly discover APIs they weren’t aware of and easily secure them in just a few clicks.

“APIs were never built with security in mind. Yet, today APIs are involved in nearly every app a consumer or employee touches, often carrying our sensitive personal data,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. “Every day Cloudflare’s network blocks about 86 billion cyber threats for our customers. We’re confident that no other API tool sees the breadth or volume of threats that we do. We’ve built next generation AI and Machine Learning engines that take API management to a new level; automatically detecting new APIs and preventing threats. As with other Cloudflare products, API Gateway will do all of this at a fraction of the cost and without the latency introduced by legacy solutions.”

With Cloudflare API Gateway, businesses will be able to:

• Identify and stop API abuse: Leveraging Cloudflare’s unique Machine Learning engine that processes 32+ million requests per second, customers can now automatically analyze their API traffic to detect and prevent API abuses.
• Automatically detect unmanaged APIs: As API use grows, sometimes developers may publish APIs that security teams aren’t aware of. Cloudflare API Gateway passively scans the entire network and automatically lists API endpoints for complete visibility.
• Create and manage APIs directly with Cloudflare Workers: Customers will be able to use integrations with Cloudflare Workers to create lightweight, dynamic APIs that run at our edge.
• Offload authentication and authorization: The gateway will support industry protocols like OAuth 2.0, JSON Web Tokens (JWT) as well as leverage authentication methods available in Cloudflare Access such as Mutual TLS and service tokens.
• Seamlessly route, log, and measure API requests: Cloudflare’s existing products, like Transform Rules, will introduce native gateway functionality without adding latency, helping keep Cloudflare’s API Gateway as fast as possible.

Schema Validation, API Discovery, mTLS, and API Abuse detection are available today, with remaining features coming later this year.

[1] Source: Gartner, “Predicts 2022: APIs Demand Improved Security and Management”, Shameen Pillai, Jeremy D’Hoinne, John Santoro, Mark O’Neill, Sham Gill, 6 December 2021. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.