APIs now sit at the heart of nearly all modern enterprise environments. From cloud infrastructure and SaaS platforms to identity systems, CI/CD pipelines, and even security tooling, APIs are the primary mechanism through which configuration changes are made. They offer speed, scale, and consistency — but they also introduce a subtle and often overlooked risk: critical security controls can be altered without a user ever touching a server, file, or registry key in the traditionally audited ways we’ve focused on for decades.
For many organizations, configuration monitoring still focuses on operating systems and applications deployed to servers. That approach made sense when security controls lived primarily on the host. Today, however, many of the most impactful configuration decisions — identity permissions, logging behavior, network exposure, and platform hardening — are defined and enforced through APIs. When those API‑driven changes are not monitored, organizations may believe their environments are stable and compliant while their security posture quietly drifts underneath them.
APIs are particularly attractive to attackers because they are designed to make change easy. A single authenticated call could disable logging, weaken authentication requirements, create a new privileged identity, or expose previously restricted services. These actions often appear legitimate because they use supported interfaces and valid credentials. Nothing is “exploited” or modified in the traditional sense, yet the security impact can be significant and long‑lasting.
In practice, this is where configuration drift has moved as well. It is no longer just about files changing on disk or registry values being modified; drift now occurs in cloud control planes, SaaS tenant settings, and network devices administered entirely through management APIs. Without visibility at that layer, security teams are effectively monitoring only part of the environment.
API Monitoring in the Real World: Lessons from the Field
As a Professional Services consultant, I’ve seen this gap appear repeatedly across different sectors. A common example involves Microsoft Office 365 and Entra ID environments. Many organizations invest significant time in hardening their tenant by disabling legacy authentication, tightening conditional access, improving audit logging, and aligning with frameworks such as CIS or Microsoft Secure Score. The challenge comes months later, when no one can confidently answer whether those settings are still in place.
In several client engagements, I’ve implemented API‑based monitoring of Microsoft 365 configuration settings specifically to address this problem. By establishing a baseline of hardened settings and tracking changes over time using our integrity monitoring toolset, clients could see exactly when security‑relevant configurations were modified and in which area of the tenant. Because we built solutions around these APIs not just for change auditing but also for assessing changes against their desired hardening settings, clients were able to demonstrate measurable improvements in their security posture over time. They could also quickly identify regressions caused by well‑meaning administrators, new integrations, or automated workflows. This shifted tenant security from a one‑off hardening exercise to an ongoing, auditable control set.
... and It's Not Just Cloud Services
I’ve seen similar patterns in network environments, particularly with modern firewalls and network security devices managed almost entirely through APIs (rather than via SSH logins and configuration files).
In an engagement last year, one client was less concerned about firewall rule changes and more focused on administrative tampering — who could access the device, which authentication methods were enabled, and whether safeguards such as logging, backups, and role separation were being weakened. They had been effective at monitoring traditional configuration files, but struggled as vendors moved these settings into configuration databases that were not easily audited by scripting.
By monitoring firewall configurations through vendor APIs, we focused on auditing administrative settings rather than traffic policies alone. This included tracking changes to admin accounts, authentication methods, management access settings, and audit configurations. As a result, the client gained an early‑warning system for unauthorized or risky changes that could undermine the integrity of the network perimeter. In environments where devices were managed at scale, API monitoring was the only practical way to maintain consistent oversight. And because we could monitor both their legacy, SSH‑based systems and their more modern firewall appliances, we provided a holistic view from a single dashboard.
Why API-Level Visibility Changes the Security Conversation
Across these examples, API monitoring consistently provides visibility where traditional tools fall short. It surfaces configuration changes that can be highly impactful yet easy to miss — especially in environments relying heavily on automation or delegated administration.
It also strengthens accountability. In automated environments, many changes are made by service principals, pipelines, or third‑party integrations rather than named individuals. API monitoring makes these changes visible and traceable, which is essential for incident response, audit, and root‑cause analysis.
From a compliance perspective, API‑level visibility closes an increasingly common gap. Many security frameworks require organizations to demonstrate control over configuration changes, but they do not differentiate between local modifications and those made through APIs. Without monitoring the latter, compliance evidence can be incomplete or misleading.
Integrating API Monitoring Into a Broader Strategy
Monitoring API‑driven configuration changes should not be treated as a standalone control. It is most effective when integrated into a broader strategy that includes traditional file integrity monitoring, security configuration management, identity monitoring, and centralized alerting and response. Together, these capabilities provide defense‑in‑depth across the full stack — from the operating system up to the cloud control plane.
The key is focus. Effective API monitoring is not about capturing every possible change, but about identifying and tracking the configurations that materially affect security posture. When done well, it reduces noise, shortens investigation timelines, and gives security teams confidence that critical controls remain in place.
At Fortra, our Professional Services team has extensive experience building these solutions using our Integrity Monitoring toolset. If this is a gap you’re looking to address, we’d be happy to help.
