How To Enforce Data Compliance With Your APIs
Ensuring API compliance is critical to the success of your Application Programming Interface (API) programs. APIs let consumers access, interact, and extract an enterprise’s functionalities and data. And if these exposed services fall into the wrong hands, it could lead to serious security ramifications. Several regulations and policies have been instituted worldwide that stipulate how businesses can acquire, manage, and expend users’ data. As an API provider, following these guidelines will ensure your exposed data, which is at the heart of your business, is safe, secure, and always available to API consumers. Otherwise, you could attract huge regulatory penalties.
Similarly, as an API consumer, going for a complaint API could help you protect your users’ data, maintain your enterprise’s reputation, and avoid regulatory penalties. APIs have become essential in fuelling the digital transformation efforts of most businesses. While APIs are greatly beneficial, they can raise serious privacy and security issues.
Role of API Compliance in Enterprise Risk Management
API compliance is essential in enterprise risk management. It enables organizations to follow stringent data protection and privacy laws for managing risks that may harm the integrity and availability of their data. APIs can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can provide several benefits, such as increasing productivity, reducing costs, and improving connectivity and collaboration. On the other hand, because APIs provide programmatic access to services and data, this enhanced transparency makes them an attractive target to hacking attacks.
Therefore, it’s essential to implement robust access control and security mechanisms to guarantee the safety of the data exposed via APIs. Ensuring your enterprise meets its data compliance requirements could secure critical company resources and protect customers’ sensitive data. Complying with legal obligations will make you accountable for monitoring and safeguarding the sensitive digital assets you expose or consume. Besides greatly lowering the risk of data breaches, ensuring API compliance could also help you avoid costly fines often associated with non-compliance.
For example, following the much-publicized Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal in early 2018, in which Cambridge Analytica misused Facebook APIs to get millions of sensitive user’s data illicitly, the social media giant was fined $5 billion for the data breaches.
