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A third-party integration is an access path into your data or business functions—not a reason to trust everything on the other side of it. To reduce risk, keep an accurate inventory, limit each connection’s permissions, validate what it sends, and monitor whether its access is still justified. The ten steps below are a practical synthesis of NIST and OWASP guidance, not an official checklist from either organization.
1. Inventory every API and connected SaaS application
You cannot govern a connection you do not know exists. Build one inventory that covers both APIs your teams operate and applications that connect to your SaaS through OAuth or another delegated-access mechanism. Include integrations introduced by departments outside the formal engineering or procurement process.
For each entry, record its business purpose, accountable owner, provider and specific service, hosts and endpoints, deployed API versions, data it can read or change, credentials or access grants, and the systems that depend on it. OWASP’s API Security Top 10 (2023) highlights improper inventory management, including the risks of outdated versions and exposed debug endpoints. For delegated AI SaaS access specifically, the Cloud Security Alliance’s 2026 note recommends maintaining a verified list of applications, scopes, and current business justifications.
2. Classify integrations by data, privilege, and business impact
Use a risk tier to decide how much scrutiny and control each connection needs. An integration that reads public catalog data is not equivalent to one that can export customer records, change payment details, or administer accounts.
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- Data sensitivity: What information can the provider access, and what would exposure or alteration mean?
- Permission breadth: Can it read, create, change, delete, or administer records? Can it act across multiple users or tenants?
- Operational dependence: Would an outage or compromise interrupt a critical service or business process?
- Potential impact: Could misuse cause data loss, fraud, privacy harm, regulatory exposure, or material cost?
NIST SP 800-228-upd1, updated March 13, 2026, treats API risk across development and runtime and recommends selecting controls according to risk. OWASP supply-chain guidance likewise supports varying supplier scrutiny with a component’s criticality and nature. Use those principles to make review depth proportionate rather than applying the same process to every integration.
3. Assess the supplier and the specific service
Review the offering your organization will actually use, not only the provider’s corporate reputation. A supplier may operate several services with different data flows, security features, subprocessors, or operational roles. Determine how the service handles your data, how it responds to vulnerabilities, and what evidence is available about its security practices.
Consider relevant independent assessments and the provider’s security history, but treat a certificate or completed questionnaire as evidence to weigh—not as a guarantee. OWASP supply-chain guidance says certifications can be useful data points but should not be relied on exclusively. NIST’s supply-chain material is directed principally at federal agency acquisition and management; its supplier-risk concepts can inform private-sector reviews, but they are not universal requirements for private organizations.
4. Give each integration only the access it needs
Grant the narrowest permissions that support the documented business purpose. Prefer specific OAuth scopes over broad access, and separate read access from write or administrative access where the service allows it. Examine permissions that span users, workspaces, or tenants especially carefully.
Use a dedicated service identity when an integration legitimately requires broad access, rather than tying it to an employee’s personal account. OWASP recommends least privilege and separation of duties. In its specific context of AI tools holding delegated SaaS OAuth access, the Cloud Security Alliance’s 2026 note recommends setting maximum permissible scopes by tool category and reviewing scopes quarterly. Those are CSA recommendations for that use case, not a universal legal requirement or a substitute for risk-based review.
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5. Protect tokens, API keys, and other credentials
Handle integration credentials as secrets that can unlock real data and actions. Do not store them in clear text or commit them to source control. Keep them in a controlled secrets store, restrict which people and workloads can retrieve them, and avoid reusing a credential across unrelated integrations.
Set a rotation cadence according to organizational policy and the credential’s exposure and impact. Revoke credentials when an integration is retired or when compromise is suspected. OWASP supply-chain guidance supports multifactor authentication, credential rotation, and avoiding clear-text credentials or source-control commits.
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A known provider can still return malformed, unexpected, stale, or compromised data. Validate response formats and values against what your application expects; reject or safely handle fields that are missing, out of range, or of an unexpected type. Apply the same safe parsing and output-handling practices you would use for other external input.
Do not let a response directly trigger sensitive actions without the checks your own application requires. OWASP’s API Security Top 10 (2023) identifies unsafe consumption of APIs and warns that developers may apply weaker security standards to third-party data than to user input.
7. Enforce authentication and authorization for every object and action
Authentication establishes who or what is making a request; authorization decides what that identity may do. Verify both at the point where data or an action is accessed. Do not assume that a request is permitted merely because it arrived through an authenticated integration or a trusted network path.
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Check that the caller may access the specific object and its individual properties, and separately authorize sensitive or administrative functions. OWASP’s 2023 API list names broken object-level authorization, broken authentication, broken object-property-level authorization, and broken function-level authorization. These failures can expose data or actions even when an API has authentication in place.
8. Limit abuse, cost, and unsafe automated workflows
Set rate limits and suitable quotas for API clients, and monitor expensive downstream calls. A valid integration can still generate excessive requests through a bug, a compromised credential, or an automated workflow that repeats an action unexpectedly.
Consider business-flow risks as well as conventional technical flaws. Repeatedly invoking a sensitive workflow—such as issuing credits or initiating paid operations—can cause harm even if each individual request is correctly formed. OWASP identifies unrestricted resource consumption and unrestricted access to sensitive business flows as API risks. NIST describes gateway policies such as rate limiting as one possible control; the appropriate limits depend on the service and its legitimate workload.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.9. Maintain secure configuration and an accurate API lifecycle
Review the configuration of API gateways and services, including authentication and authorization policies, exposed routes, and debugging features. Keep track of API versions through development and deployment, and retire obsolete versions and endpoints when they are no longer needed.
Make configuration and version changes visible to the people responsible for security and operations. OWASP identifies security misconfiguration and improper inventory management among API risks. NIST SP 800-228-upd1 frames controls across the API lifecycle, including before runtime and during runtime, allowing teams to implement protections incrementally according to risk.
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10. Monitor, review, test, and revoke access continuously
Capture logs that help explain what happened: authentication attempts, sensitive actions, access changes, and configuration changes. Make sure logs are monitored and usable for investigation; collecting events without anyone able to act on them is not an effective control. Establish a response path for suspected compromise, including who can disable an integration and revoke its credentials or grants.
Revisit the inventory, provider status, permissions, and business justification as services and organizational needs change. Remove access that is dormant or no longer justified. The Cloud Security Alliance’s 2026 recommendation to review grants quarterly and promptly revoke unused OAuth access applies to its AI SaaS context. OWASP supply-chain guidance also supports actionable logging and monitoring across systems.
How to choose controls without overbuying
No single API gateway, scanner, vendor questionnaire, or certification makes an integration secure. NIST presents API controls as implementation options with trade-offs, supporting a layered and risk-based approach. When comparing a control or tool, evaluate:
- Coverage: Does it help discover APIs and connected applications, check development changes, enforce controls at runtime, or expose SaaS OAuth grants?
- Control depth: Which of authentication, authorization, input validation, rate limiting, configuration management, and monitoring does it actually support?
- Operational fit: Does it work with your architecture and engineering workflow, and can your team maintain it?
- Governance evidence: Can owners review useful logs, track changes, export access information, and perform periodic reviews?
- Proportionality: Is the protection worth the complexity, performance cost, and ongoing work for the sensitivity and impact involved?
Use tools as part of the control system, not as a substitute for it. OWASP cautions that security tools are only one component and cannot be relied on to identify every vulnerability.
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