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.

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Shifting trends

The changing API landscape

Drawing from trillions of requests across our global customer base, Fastly has a real-time view into trends that impact security teams.

  • 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.

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  • 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.

Fastly API Security

Manage and protect your APIs everywhere

Make sense of your APIs, gain confidence, and build resilience into your API strategy.

  • 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?

  • API Security

    Fastly API Security protects your APIs everywhere against OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks, payloads targeting specific API protocols, and much more.

    Download the datasheet

  • GraphQL Inspection

    The Fastly Next-Gen WAF provides the ability to parse GraphQL requests, enabling visibility and protection against GraphQL attacks.

    Download the datasheet

  • Navigating the OWASP Top 10

    Dive into the OWASP Top 10 web application security risks with helpful insights, examples, and strategies.

    Download the white paper

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.

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