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Unlocking the Future of API Performance and Compliance: APIContext Partners with Akamai

APIContext and Akamai logos

In today’s digital landscape, nearly all meaningful application traffic—whether it’s banking transactions, retail commerce, or media streaming—is delivered over the public web. With over 90% of digital experiences now occurring on APIs over the open web, ensuring API performance, security, and compliance is more critical than ever. This is where APIContext, in partnership with Akamai, steps in.

As CEO of APIContext, and having previously worked at Akamai through their acquisition of an OAuth pioneer, I’ve seen firsthand the evolution of digital identity and API security. In the early days, the biggest challenge was securely managing password storage. Today, the landscape has transformed—APIs are secured by design with identity-driven authentication mechanisms like OAuth2. These advancements have made APIs not only more secure but also more integral to digital business operations across industries.

We are excited to announce that APIContext has joined the Akamai Qualified Compute Partner Program as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV). This partnership allows us to leverage Akamai’s globally distributed cloud platform to provide enterprises with advanced API performance monitoring and compliance testing solutions. Together, APIContext and Akamai are set to help businesses ensure continuous API performance with unmatched scalability, reliability, and security across multiple regions.

The Shift to API-First Monitoring: A Deeper Look at Mobile and Microservices

Historically, web-first monitoring approaches made sense when monolithic architectures dominated the digital landscape. In the early days of application design, a typical web server would communicate directly with back-office systems, creating a one-to-one connection that delivered dynamic content. This model worked well for websites where pages loaded content from a single location. Monitoring at the network level sufficed, as it was easy to track traffic between servers and web pages.

However, as the industry has moved toward mobile-first applications and microservices architectures, this traditional approach has quickly become obsolete. The way modern applications—particularly mobile apps—interact with back-end APIs has fundamentally changed. Today’s secure mobile apps rarely consume APIs directly from the app itself. Instead, they route requests through secure gateways, middleware layers or microservices.

For example, in highly regulated industries like banking, a mobile app checking an account balance won’t communicate directly with the bank’s back-end API. It will first communicate through a secure microservice, which then processes the API call. This is essential to ensure sensitive credentials, like OAuth tokens, are never stored on the mobile device, safeguarding against potential breaches. This architecture adds layers of complexity but is crucial for maintaining security and compliance in industries with stringent data protection regulations.

The Key Challenge: This shift to microservices creates new monitoring challenges. Traditional last-mile network monitoring is no longer sufficient, as traffic is often encrypted and routed through intermediary services, which aren’t visible in standard monitoring tools. Monitoring now needs to account for secure microservices, distributed across various cloud regions and providers.

The Critical Flaw in Traditional Synthetic API Testing: Security Vulnerabilities in Basic Auth and API Key Models

One of the most significant limitations of traditional synthetic API testing tools is their reliance on basic authentication or API key and secret. This legacy approach, while easy to implement, poses serious security risks, particularly in regulated industries such as retail, finance, healthcare, telecommunications, and any sector that must adhere to PCI DSS or GDPR standards.

By design, basic authentication and API keys lack the security controls necessary to meet the compliance requirements of these industries. Credentials are often stored on the client side and sent with every request, increasing the risk of interception and exposure in the event of a breach. This approach makes traditional tools permissive by design, allowing them to operate outside the critical security boundaries that modern security controls require.

The Big Problem: Any synthetic testing tool that relies on basic auth or API key/secret cannot guarantee the level of security required for handling sensitive data like payment information, healthcare records, or personally identifiable information (PII). These tools inherently lack the ability to adhere to the strict security profiles mandated by regulatory bodies, such as OAuth2 and OpenID Connect (OIDC).

The Only Way Forward: OAuth2 and Beyond

In contrast, APIContext supports OAuth2, the gold standard for secure API authorization. OAuth2 provides token-based authentication, ensuring that sensitive credentials are never stored on devices or transmitted in an insecure manner. OAuth2 also enables fine-grained access control, allowing businesses to limit what an API client can do and for how long, reducing the attack surface for potential breaches.

In regulated industries—whether it’s PCI DSS compliance for financial services, HIPAA in healthcare, or CDR regulations in Australia—OAuth2 is non-negotiable. Any tool that does not support OAuth2 is simply unfit for purpose.

APIContext’s Advantage: Unlike traditional testing solutions, APIContext’s platform fully integrates with OAuth2, ensuring that our continuous API testing not only evaluates performance but also validates security and compliance with modern security standards. This is essential for businesses operating in regulated environments, where data breaches or non-compliance can result in severe penalties and damage to reputation.

Conversely we allow businesses to continuously test their APIs without exposing sensitive credentials. By leveraging OAuth2, we ensure that all interactions are secure and adhere to the most stringent industry standards, protecting your data and your business from potential threats.

Proactive, Continuous Testing: The APIContext Approach

At APIContext, we recognize that proactive, continuous testing of APIs is the only way to ensure real-world performance and compliance in this complex digital landscape. With our partnership with Akamai, we bring real-world workflow simulations to mission-critical APIs, ensuring they perform as expected from various geographic regions and through different points of presence.

Here’s where our approach goes beyond traditional heartbeat testing. Instead of merely checking if an API is up or down, APIContext simulates real user workflows from multiple global locations using different cloud providers. For example, we simulate an entire banking workflow, from a login request to an account balance query, routing through the necessary middleware layers and secure microservices. This allows businesses to get a holistic view of their API performance, identifying bottlenecks not just in the API itself but in the broader microservices architecture that supports it.

In regulated industries like finance, security and performance go hand-in-hand. With Akamai’s Connected Cloud services and 24 availability zones, APIContext provides businesses with outside-in monitoring that mimics real-world user experiences, ensuring APIs are not just operational but compliant with security standards such as OAuth 2.0, FAPI, and Open Banking V4.

Simulating TLS 1.3 vs. TLS 1.2: Optimizing Encryption Hops and Certificate Exchange

One of the key areas where APIContext delivers additional value is in the ability to simulate the performance benefits of modern encryption protocols. As the world transitions from TLS 1.2 to TLS 1.3, businesses must understand how these changes impact the performance and security of their API calls.

TLS 1.3 introduces significant improvements over TLS 1.2, particularly in terms of latency reduction by eliminating one round trip in the handshake process. This makes TLS 1.3 more efficient, especially for time-sensitive applications like payment processing or real-time communications. However, businesses often struggle to simulate these improvements in real-world conditions or understand how the certificate exchange process might impact global performance.

APIContext’s Advantage: APIContext allows organizations to test the impact of upgrading to TLS 1.3 by simulating API workflows with both TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3, helping businesses see the direct impact on latency. Our platform provides detailed insights into how the reduced handshake time in TLS 1.3 can improve API response times, particularly for global operations. Furthermore, we help businesses fine-tune their certificate exchange processes by simulating the number of hops required to retrieve a certificate and the performance impact across different cloud regions.

Whether it’s optimizing the certificate provider selection or reducing the TLS handshake time, APIContext enables businesses to pinpoint where the performance gains lie and implement encryption best practices for their APIs, ensuring both security and speed are maximized.

Ensuring Compliance in a Middleware-Driven World

With the rise of API-first and mobile-first applications, security requirements have become more complex and stringent. In highly regulated sectors like finance, healthcare, retail and insurance, API calls that once directly connected to back-office systems must now pass through middleware layers. This architecture ensures that sensitive credentials, such as OAuth tokens, are never stored on mobile devices, thereby minimizing exposure and safeguarding against breaches. The adoption of middleware architectures is particularly critical in open banking, where secure microservices handle sensitive financial data such as payment authorizations and account balances.

According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for APIs, the growing complexity of API-first and mobile-first systems has led to a significant increase in security vulnerabilities. APIs, especially in industries like finance, are increasingly viewed as high-value targets for cyberattacks, making it imperative to use secure microservice-based architectures to mediate API calls. This allows sensitive data to be transmitted securely without exposing critical credentials on end-user devices, such as mobile phones.

In fact, Forrester’s Wave on API Management stresses the importance of adopting OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (OIDC) for secure token management, particularly in the open banking ecosystem. Open banking frameworks like FAPI and FDX set industry-wide standards for ensuring security during data exchanges, underscoring the importance of using middleware as a secure intermediary.

The middleware layer acts as a trusted, secure intermediary, ensuring that API credentials, such as OAuth tokens, are securely managed, and that sensitive data doesn’t flow directly between the mobile app and the back-end API. This design minimizes the attack surface by keeping critical security credentials out of reach of unauthorized users. KuppingerCole’s API Security Leadership Compass also emphasizes that middleware and microservices architecture help distribute risk by compartmentalizing data access, further protecting sensitive data.

In this model, real-time monitoring of API performance and security conformance across the middleware layer becomes essential. Any performance slowdown or failure in the middleware could have significant consequences, especially in time-sensitive industries like finance and healthcare, where even minor delays could lead to compliance violations or degraded user experiences.

APIContext addresses these challenges head-on by continuously testing APIs and ensuring they meet rigorous industry standards such as OAuth 2.0, FAPI, and the latest FDX standards (versions 5.3 to 6.1). Our platform simulates real-world workflows, including secure API calls through middleware layers, to ensure that APIs remain fast, secure, and compliant—especially after code pushes or updates. This proactive approach provides enterprises with full visibility into the performance and security of their middleware, helping prevent issues before they affect users.

According to the Akamai State of the Internet Report, the role of middleware is critical in improving API resilience and latency, as well as ensuring compliance in an increasingly regulated environment. This is particularly relevant in markets like open banking, where the regulatory focus is shifting towards stricter controls around data-sharing APIs, further underlining the importance of continuous testing and security validation through middleware.

By aligning APIContext’s platform with these industry guidelines, we ensure that enterprises are not only meeting regulatory requirements but also enhancing the security posture of their API ecosystems, without compromising on performance.

Akamai Optimizations: Proving Real-World Impact

Through our proactive monitoring and real-world workflow simulations, APIContext provides organizations with empirical evidence of the performance and security benefits gained from Akamai’s optimizations, such as:

  • Pre-Freshing: Ensuring that content is preloaded and available at the edge before it’s requested, minimizing latency for critical API calls.
  • EdgeDNS: Optimizing the domain name resolution process, shortening the time it takes to connect users to the nearest and most efficient server, enhancing both API performance and reliability.
  • Akamai API Accelerator: Accelerating API traffic by reducing the time required for secure handshakes and other interactions, especially when dealing with heavy traffic loads or global distribution. APIContext helps validate these gains by simulating various API call loads and regions to measure improvements in speed and resilience.

Our continuous testing demonstrates measurable performance gains, proving the efficiency of Akamai’s API acceleration and edge services in real-world scenarios.

Enhancing API Security with 3rd Party Telemetry

Beyond performance, APIContext adds real-time API telemetry to Akamai API Security, including solutions from NoName Security, providing businesses with 360-degree visibility into their entire API environment. By enriching Akamai’s security stack with third-party API telemetry and conformance tests, we ensure that every API—whether first-party or third-party—meets industry security standards such as OAuth 2.0, FAPI, and FDX.

One concern in the market is that many API security solutions, particularly those that rely on proxy-based architectures, can introduce latency by blocking or intercepting traffic before reaching the application layer. This is particularly true for some market-leading tools that proxy API traffic rather than integrating natively with the Web Application Firewall (WAF). While these security tools are designed to protect against API threats, they can inadvertently slow down performance, especially for mission-critical workflows in time-sensitive industries like finance or healthcare.

APIContext addresses this concern by providing ongoing, empirical evidence of the performance impact of Akamai’s API Security solutions. By continuously testing APIs in real-world scenarios, APIContext demonstrates how Akamai’s native WAF integration can offer robust security without introducing latency. 

Through APIContext’s third-party telemetry, any performance degradation caused by external or third-party security services can be identified and resolved proactively—ensuring that API security does not come at the expense of user experience.

This comprehensive monitoring ensures that any blind spots introduced by third-party services are proactively identified and resolved before they impact critical workflows. It’s an essential step for industries like finance, telecommunications, and healthcare, where both security and compliance must be maintained across all touchpoints, including those not directly managed by internal teams.

With APIContext and Akamai API Security, businesses gain complete visibility into the security and performance of their API ecosystems, without sacrificing speed or efficiency.

Enriching Observability: Full API Visibility Across Global Nodes

APIContext’s partnership with Akamai also improves global observability through integrations with Akamai’s tools like TrafficPeak and mPulse. By sending APIContext telemetry into TrafficPeak, organizations can enrich their inside-edge observability and address blind spots in third-party API performance. This gives businesses a comprehensive view of their API health, not only within their own infrastructure but also across all external APIs that interact with their platform.

With full visibility across Akamai’s global nodes, organizations can continuously validate the resilience, performance, and compliance of their APIs—ensuring optimal user experiences no matter where the traffic originates.

 

Optimizing Security and Performance for the Future

As APIs continue to play a central role in the digital landscape, businesses need solutions that ensure both security and performance without compromise. The partnership between APIContext and Akamai provides organizations with the tools to meet these demands—delivering proactive, real-world insights into API performance, resilience, and compliance. With the combined strength of Akamai’s global infrastructure and APIContext’s advanced monitoring, businesses can confidently optimize their API ecosystems, ensuring they’re prepared for the challenges of today and the innovations of tomorrow.

Existing Akamai customers: Reach out to your integrated account team to learn how you can get started with a free 2-week trial of the APIContext platform. This trial will allow you to start comparing and contrasting your APIs’ performance and security, leveraging APIContext’s proactive monitoring to gain deeper insights into your API health.

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