Defend your APIs wherever they are
Fastly API Security
Get the full picture of your API landscape – understand what exists, gain confidence that things are working as expected, and make targeted API abuse mitigation decisions across the Fastly platform.
The changing API landscape
Increasing pace of development
Organizations have lots of moving parts, and platform teams need to manage constant new and changing functions. When the pace never slows down, it’s hard to keep track of the chaos.
More APIs to secure
With an average of 145 applications to secure, there are never enough hours in the day to fully understand the hundreds or thousands of related APIs before something inevitably breaks.
More unknowns and third parties
No company operates alone – and the challenges of integrating, monitoring, managing, deprecating, and securing APIs from external dependencies adds complexity to already overburdened teams.
Increased use of AI
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and the explosion of AI platforms (and their APIs) has led to an unprecedented increase in API requests, management challenges, and security gaps.
Gaps in automation and transparency
API management is often opaque with manual processes and limited resources. Without adequate automation and transparency, it’s difficult for platform and security teams to get the context and confidence they need to collaborate.
Consolidation
90% of security decision-makers report that the current economic and political climate has impacted their security budget and buying decisions. It’s more important than ever to save money, time, and energy while maintaining platforms.
API security shouldn’t be a burden
Everything gets done with teamwork, but your teams that build and secure applications have different needs and goals. Fastly API Security helps break down the barriers between them with shared data sets and tools to bring you the right context at the right time for collaborative decision making.
Uncover and record your public-facing APIs
Automatically detect new, updated, and unintentional API calls within Fastly's Edge network.
Streamline communication and delivery
With security that protects everywhere, you’ll bring transparency and security into your entire API lifecycle, and keep your platform and security teams in sync – with no surprises.
Build context for resilience
Identify problems early in the API lifecycle, and adjust before they break things and cause pain for your customers and internal teams. Align your API strategy with business goals, and prevent API misuse that leads to security breaches.
Manage and protect your APIs everywhere
API Discovery
Uncover your public-facing APIs and automatically detect new incoming API calls within Fastly’s Edge network.
Next-Gen WAF
Identify and mitigate vulnerable or unwanted API traffic with targeted rules and actions, including deception.
DDoS Protection
Detect and stop API-focused DDoS attacks quickly – in seconds, not hours.
Bot Management
Identify and mitigate unwanted API calls from bots and crawlers before they negatively impact your bottom line or your user experience.
Edge Rate Limiting
Stop malicious and anomalous high-volume requests and reduce API utilization while letting legitimate traffic through.
Performance
Identify efficiency gains and opportunities for cost savings within your API catalog.
Looking for more?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is API security?
API security refers to the technologies and practices used to discover, monitor, protect, and defend APIs from abuse, attacks, and data exposure. Effective API security goes beyond authentication to detect business logic abuse, credential stuffing, bot-driven attacks, and anomalous behavior across modern REST and GraphQL APIs.
Why is API security critical for modern applications?
APIs power microservices, mobile apps, and cloud-native architectures, making them a primary attack surface. Without dedicated API protection, organizations are vulnerable to:
- Account takeover and credential abuse
- Data exfiltration through exposed endpoints
- Abuse of undocumented or shadow APIs
- API-based DDoS and automated attacks
API security is now foundational to application security for digital businesses.
How does Fastly’s API security platform protect APIs?
Fastly’s API security platform delivers API protection at the edge, combining:
- Continuous API discovery and inventory-level tracking
- Behavioral anomaly detection and attack prevention
- Protection against OWASP API Top 10 threats
- Low-latency mitigation without application changes
By running at the edge, Fastly stops malicious API traffic before it reaches origin infrastructure.
How is API security different from a traditional WAF?
Yes. Fastly automatically discovers and inventories APIs by observing live traffic, identifying:
- Public, private, and shadow APIs
- Hostnames, endpoints, and methods
- Changes in API behavior over time
This continuous discovery enables security teams to reduce blind spots and enforce policy with confidence.
How does Fastly detect API attacks?
Fastly uses behavioral analysis at the edge to baseline normal API behavior and identify anomalies such as:
- Sudden traffic spikes
- Credential abuse and automation
- Enumeration and scraping attempts
- Abnormal request patterns
This enables effective mitigation without relying solely on static rules.
How does API security fit into Fastly’s broader security platform?
API security is a core part of Fastly’s edge-native security portfolio, which includes:
- Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Bot Management
- DDoS Protection
- Client-Side Protection
- API Discovery
- Edge Compute
Together, these capabilities provide full-stack application and API protection with a single control plane.
Is Fastly’s API security suitable for large-scale enterprises?
Absolutely. Fastly’s API security solutions are built for high-scale, high-performance environments, supporting:
- Global traffic volumes
- Mission-critical APIs
- DevOps and security team workflows
This makes it well suited for enterprises, SaaS providers, and platforms where API reliability and security are business-critical.
How quickly can teams deploy Fastly API security?
Fastly API security can be deployed without code changes and begins providing visibility and protection almost immediately. Edge-native enforcement ensures minimal latency impact while delivering rapid time to value for security and engineering teams.