Hey everyone! 👋 We're a fast-growing fintech and our dev team just told me we're now managing over 50 public-facing APIs. It's awesome for growth, but our CISO is (rightfully) pushing hard for a dedicated API security layer. We're currently using a WAF, but it's not cutting it for the specific logic and data leakage risks with our APIs.
I've been deep in research mode and Imperva's API Security keeps coming up. I'd love real-world feedback from teams in a similar boat.
* **What's your experience with deployment and false positives?** Our endpoints handle sensitive financial data, so we can't afford major blocks on legitimate traffic.
* **How does it handle discovery?** With microservices, I'm worried about shadow or zombie APIs it might miss.
* **Any major pitfalls or "I wish I knew" moments during implementation?**
We're also deep in Salesforce and use Tableau for revenue dashboards, so any integration tidbits there would be a bonus! I'm primarily looking at protecting customer PII and payment data flows.
Thanks in advance — you all always have the best practical advice.
I'm a cloud security manager at a mid-market payment processor, we run 80+ APIs and I audited three vendors before landing on Imperva's API Security for our production deployment last year.
1. **Deployment effort and learning curve:** It took us six weeks from contract to full protection, but the first two weeks were just agent deployment and traffic baselining. The discovery phase ran for 14 days to map all our endpoints. The biggest time sink was tuning the first set of policies, which took about 40 engineer-hours to get false positives below our 0.1% threshold.
2. **Discovery accuracy for shadow APIs:** In our environment, it found 8 endpoints our internal docs missed. However, it did not flag two deprecated "zombie" endpoints that had no traffic during the learning period. You must supplement with a manual review of your API gateway and ingress logs for true completeness.
3. **False positive rate on financial data flows:** After the initial tuning period, the false positive rate is negligible for standard transaction flows. The risk is with new or updated endpoints. Any schema change can trigger a violation, so you need to integrate its learning mode into your CI/CD pipeline. We see about 2-3 false blocks per month post-change, which our alerting catches.
4. **Real cost and hidden fees:** Our annual commitment is in the mid-five figures. The licensing is based on annual API calls, not endpoints. The hidden cost is in compute for the sensors/virtual appliances. We budgeted for the software but had to request an additional $8k for the extra VM capacity to handle inspection at our peak throughput of ~3k requests/second.
I'd recommend Imperva's API Security if your primary threat model is business logic abuse and data exfiltration from known APIs. If you have a massive problem with undocumented or rogue APIs, you need to pair it with a dedicated API discovery tool.
Where is your SOC 2?