Gartner defines API protection products as a category of specialized stand-alone security products focusing on protecting APIs from exploits, abuse and access violations, and assisting in remediating API exposures. These products offer features such as API discovery, API security testing, API posture management and runtime protection utilizing behavioral analysis. They should provide coverage for the internal- and external-facing APIs, and third-party APIs that organizations may consume. API protection products are delivered as cloud-based and on-premises solutions. Deployment can be offered in-line by intercepting ingress/egress API calls or out-of-band by deploying agents on application workloads and/or scanning code repositories.
The In-app protection market refers to security solutions implemented within the application (instead of the network or the operating system, for example) to make the application more resistant to attacks such as malicious data exfiltration, intrusion, tampering, and reverse engineering. Enterprises use in-app protection to safeguard their software-based assets and to protect their organization and customers from fraudulent attacks.