What Is Enterprise Application Software?

Enterprise application software is a class of software programs designed to help enterprises, global companies, and large-scale organizations manage complex tasks and meet business needs. Enterprise application software may include communication and collaboration solutions, human resource management software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, content management technology, business process management solutions, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, supply chain management (SCM) application, and procurement and project management.

In today’s connected world, securing your enterprise application software from attack is critical for business success. This task grows more difficult as more digital assets move to the cloud and as users access software via the web. Protecting enterprise software applications from threats like business logic attacks, injection, botnets, and DDoS attacks is more difficult as web applications and APIs — and the architecture that supports them — become more complex.

Akamai can help. With industry-leading security solutions powered by unmatched insight into the world’s internet traffic, we protect your most critical assets — from clouds and users to APIs and enterprise application software.

When enterprise application software is run as a web application, these digital assets are subject to a broad range of threats and attacks. Virtually every web application relies on APIs, which create additional complexity and new points of entry that hackers can exploit. Security teams must defend against tens of thousands of known web vulnerabilities, which are reintroduced into enterprise application software with each new generation of coders. Cybercriminals have become quite adept at using automated bots to crawl websites at random, searching for the easiest point of entry. When a weakness is found, attackers can access databases to exfiltrate data, load malicious files onto servers, or overwhelm servers and software with a flood of illegitimate requests.

Akamai App & API Protector offers superior protections for your enterprise application software, web applications, and APIs against a wide range of multi-vector attacks. This application protection technology protects entire web and API estates with holistic protections designed for ease of use and automation. Powered by a new adaptive security engine, App & API Protector combines multiple industry-leading core security technologies that allow your teams to do more with less while adopting a multilayered approach to application security.

To protect enterprise application software offered via the web, App & API Protector offers powerful capabilities and some of the most advanced security automation available today.

Adaptive, self-tuning security. App & API Protector is equipped with self-tuning capabilities designed to minimize administrative overhead and reduce operational friction. This Akamai technology features multidimensional, adaptive threat-based detections that correlate threat intelligence across the Akamai platform, detecting up to 2x more attacks with a 5x reduction of false positives over our previous technology. To increase protection, all security triggers — both real attacks and false positives — are automatically analyzed with advanced machine learning to produce policy-specific tuning recommendations that security teams can accept with a few clicks.

Advanced API capabilities. App & API Protector automatically discovers a complete range of known, unknown, and changing APIs across all web traffic. This includes endpoints, definitions, and traffic profiles, helping to defend against hidden attacks, to find errors, and to reveal unexpected changes. Newly discovered APIs can be registered with just a few clicks, and all API requests are automatically inspected for malicious code, resulting in strong API security by default.

Bot visibility and mitigation. Akamai delivers real-time visibility into bot traffic as well as access to an expansive directory of more than 1,500 known bots, helping to ensure that good bot traffic is permitted while malicious activity is blocked. The ability to create your own bot definitions ensures that third-party and partner bots can operate without obstruction.

Automated security updates. Our threat researchers analyze more than 300 TB of daily attack data to identify new attack vectors as well as permutations of existing threats. The adaptive security engine within App & API Protector is then automatically updated with the latest protections to ensure the strongest possible security outcomes.

Simplified onboarding. An easy-to-use wizard offers simple integration and configuration workflows designed to streamline and accelerate the onboarding process.

Akamai App & API Protector delivers significant advantages for protecting enterprise application software.

• A single platform for application security. With App & API Protector, you can protect all of your enterprise application software, websites, web apps, and APIs from a broad range of threats. Our technology blocks volumetric DDoS attacks, automated botnets, injection attacks, and API-based attacks, among others.
• Frictionless maintenance. Automatic self-tuning enables security teams to stay focused on investigating real attacks rather than false alerts. Automatic updates ensure that your security posture remains strong.
• A unified solution. Akamai App & API Protector is part of a comprehensive security platform that also includes bot visibility and mitigation, DDoS protection, web optimization, edge compute, API acceleration, and SIEM connectors. In Edge DNS, Akamai also offers a highly secure and fast DNS service with a 100% uptime SLA, with access to thousands of DNS servers at 1,000 points of presence around the world.