Melissa Michael of F-Secure’s Safe & Savvy blog says that bricks and mortar stores were the foundation of the economy before the Internet. In her recent post, she opined that when we needed anything, we had to either get in the car and drive or order from a bulky catalog. This was true until the dot com boom, when online stores and businesses sprung up. This changing the ways goods and services were bought and sold overnight. Next came the Cloud revolutio, with online services being moved faraway to someone else’s servers, enabling greater flexibility and accessibility.
F-Secure has been at the forefront of both of these trends. Back when we were solely an antivirus company, we were the first AV vendor to establish our presence on the World Wide Web. And for years now, our Security Cloud technology has been providing real-time cloud-based threat intelligence that we rely on to help protect millions of users around the world. Now we’re on the cusp of another trend, one that’s further enabling and transforming the connected world.
That trend is the API economy. API’s are what link applications and services together. The API economy is what you get when businesses share core functionalities of their services with one another. In the end, customers and users enjoy a much greater value out of integrated services than they ever would from a sole company’s service on its own.
APIs, of course, are nothing new. What’s new is sharing them in an open and flexible way that makes it easier to connect data to get useful new information. Companies are offering core pieces of their services as APIs, allowing other business to take just the pieces that matter and use them – and pay for only what they use.
It’s like how iTunes revolutionized the music industry. Instead of having to purchase a whole CD of duds just to get that one single you love, people were able to pay just a buck for the song they loved, and only the song they loved. No fluff.
How is F-Secure participating in the API economy? It has to do with the Security Cloud I mentioned. Our Security Cloud is a wealth of threat intelligence about which websites and files can be visited or opened safely and which cannot. This knowledge isn’t just useful to us in protecting our own customers and those of our partners. It’s also needed by any application or service that allows users to submit links to external content. It should also be appealing to organizations developing IoT devices or platforms for them.
No one wants to see their discussion board, intranet, service portal or other application used to spread malicious or harmful content. Why shouldn’t we share with others what we’ve worked so hard to build?
Today we’re unveiling F-Secure Security Cloud API for AWS on AWS Marketplace. The API enables web classification and reputation services. That means it can be used to verify links to prevent users from visiting platform-inappropriate sites like gambling, hate, or adult sites. And it can also be used to prevent users from accessing links that lead to malicious sites that contain ransomware, phishing, and other threats.
It’s a pretty neat deal – connect directly to F-Secure Security Cloud, get our threat intelligence served up just for you, pay only for what you use. No fluff. That’s the API economy.