Compliance today is no longer about ticking boxes. It has evolved into a proactive discipline where enterprises must prove security through evidence. Regulators and auditors are no longer satisfied with policy statements; they demand access control logs, VAPT reports, changelogs, and sensitive data maps. At the same time, organizations are juggling six or more overlapping frameworks across security, privacy, and operational domains.
Amid this complexity, APIs have become the sharp edge of regulation. Agencies such as SEBI, RBI, MeitY, NPCI, and DSCI now place APIs at the center of compliance, insisting that security be embedded at the development stage rather than retrofitted later. What this means is simple but profound: instead of chasing fragmented audit requirements, enterprises can gain far more by embedding best practices so that compliance becomes a natural byproduct of strong, preventive security.
This is precisely where DSCI steps in. As India’s apex body for cybersecurity and data protection, DSCI distills the varied demands of regulators into actionable guidance for API security design, testing, and monitoring. Think of it as the compass that points enterprises toward resilience while navigating a fractured compliance landscape.
DSCI’s recommendations echo this theme, and following them strengthens security posture and ensures de facto compliance with diverse frameworks. In short, adopting DSCI’s best practices is the most efficient path to security and compliance.
DSCI’s API Recommendations at a Glance
DSCI’s latest API security recommendations are not abstract principles; they’re a practical roadmap for resilience. They focus on seven core areas that together create a preventive-first security posture:
- Secure API Design and Development
Adopt security-by-design practices with strong input validation, schema enforcement, and contract-first development (OpenAPI/AsyncAPI). Apply least-privilege defaults, rate limiting, and secure coding guidelines (OWASP ASVS/API Security Top 10). Integrate automated security testing into CI/CD to detect flaws early.
DSCI’s recommendations advocate embedding security from the design stage by enforcing schema validation, rejecting non-conforming requests, and applying security requirements consistently across development pipelines. They stress integrating fuzzing, SAST/DAST/IAST, and secure coding reviews into the SDLC to ensure vulnerabilities are prevented rather than patched.
- Authentication and Authorization
Enforce robust identity management, fine-grained access control, and token-based authentication (OAuth 2.0, JWT) to mitigate impersonation and privilege escalation risks, with real-time session monitoring for abnormal access patterns.
DSCI’s recommendations emphasize strong authentication (AuthN) through multi-factor and token-based methods, and fine-grained authorization (AuthZ) using RBAC and least-privilege models. They call for encryption of data in transit and at rest, regular API penetration testing to uncover access control vulnerabilities, real-time monitoring of user access controls for anomaly and fraud detection.
- API Gateway Adoption
Leverage API gateways as policy enforcement points to centralize authentication, rate limiting, schema validation, and traffic inspection. Gateways enable zero-trust enforcement, observability, and runtime resilience against volumetric abuse and injection attacks.
DSCI’s recommendations highlight the use of gateways to standardize security posture across heterogeneous environments, enforcing access control, throttling, logging, and policy-as-code uniformly. Gateways act as choke points to block anomalous traffic, support compliance logging, and simplify governance of distributed APIs.
- API Threat Intelligence and Threat Modelling
Adopt threat modeling frameworks (STRIDE, PASTA) and integrate API-specific attack vectors (injection, broken object level authorization, data exfiltration). Feed runtime telemetry into threat intel pipelines to correlate API abuse campaigns, bot activity, and credential stuffing attacks.
DSCI’s recommendations promote proactive modeling of attack surfaces with continuous updates from global threat intel sources. They advocate contextualizing threats in terms of business-critical APIs and mapping adversary tactics (MITRE ATT&CK) to API endpoints, reducing blind spots and enabling adaptive defenses.
- Continuous Monitoring
Deploy runtime anomaly detection with behavioral baselining, eBPF-powered traffic visibility, and ML-driven fraud detection. Continuously validate policy adherence and enforce runtime controls for quota violations, replay attempts, and session anomalies.
DSCI’s recommendations call for always-on telemetry across ingress/egress points, alerting tuned to reduce false positives, and automated reporting for compliance. Continuous monitoring ensures near real-time detection of anomalies, minimizes MTTD/MTTR, and strengthens runtime resilience against evolving zero-day threats.
- Incident Response
Establish automated workflows for alert triage, root cause analysis, and forensic reconstruction of API transactions. Integrate with SOAR and case management tools to accelerate containment, eradicate compromised tokens, and trigger compensating controls.
DSCI’s recommendations emphasize incident response readiness with predefined playbooks for API-centric breaches, including credential theft, data exfiltration, and fraud. They advocate tight integration with SOC pipelines, post-incident audits, and feedback loops into SDLC for prevention of recurrence.
- Compliance Mapping
Automate evidence generation for frameworks (DPDP, GDPR, PCI DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA) with continuous audit logs, data flow mapping, and control validation. Standardize evidence into exportable compliance artifacts to reduce audit fatigue.
DSCI’s recommendations highlight aligning API security with compliance mandates by embedding continuous monitoring and automated reporting. They stress that compliance should be an outcome of good security hygiene, mapping controls at the API level ensures readiness across multiple regulatory regimes without duplicated effort.
The Core Philosophy: Shift-Left Security
Across SEBI, RBI, MeitY, NPCI, and other regulators, the message is consistent: APIs must be secure by design, with strong authentication, visibility, data protection, monitoring, and audits. Each agency frames it differently, but the principle is the same, embed security from the start and manage it proactively.
By focusing on preventive measures such as secure coding, automated testing, real-time monitoring, and continuous compliance, enterprises reduce the attack surface before APIs reach production with the Shift-Left Security approach. This proactive stance not only minimizes breach likelihood but also accelerates delivery by catching issues early, when fixes are cheaper and faster.
Therefore, most bugs should have been “identified and fixed earlier in the development process”, resulting in a more robust final product.
A Ponemon Institute study reveals that 52% of organizations have adopted shift-left security, with many more piloting it, driven by faster delivery and reduced incident risk.
The Ground Reality: Why Shift-Left Often Fails
The Ponemon Institute study says organizations face several challenges in Shift Left Security which include lack of integrated security tools (51%), increased developer workload (43%), and excessive vulnerabilities (40%).
Despite its promise, Shift-Left Security often collapses under enterprise realities. Security development skill asymmetry leads to misconfigured controls, unpatched vulnerabilities, and incomplete threat modeling.
Shift-Left Security is sound in theory but fragile in practice. Enterprises face four recurring failure points:
- Upfront Investment: Training developers in secure coding, embedding security engineers into product squads, and sustaining DevSecOps maturity demands budget and headcount few enterprises commit.
- Pipeline Friction: Static scans, dependency audits, and policy gates embedded in CI/CD often slow velocity, overwhelm teams with false positives, and drive bypass behavior.
- Cultural Divide: Developers optimize for speed; security optimizes for control. Without leadership enforcing shared accountability, shift-left deepens silos instead of bridging them.
- Visibility Gap: Accurate API inventories and SBOMs are prerequisites. Most teams struggle to maintain them, leaving shadow APIs and undocumented dependencies outside security’s scope.
Coverage gaps persist as scanning remains siloed, telemetry fragmented, and asset classification inconsistent.
The result?
Too many APIs, too few security engineers, and an attack surface expanding faster than the capacity to defend it, undermining the very premise of shift-left.
DSCI Is the Direction. Levo Is the Enabler.
DSCI’s recommendations are timely, clear, and comprehensive, but they remain aspirational unless embedded into daily workflows. That’s where Levo comes in, not as another dashboard or checklist, but as the platform that operationalizes every recommendation through automation.
DSCI charts the way forward with a clear call: security must be designed into APIs from the start, not retrofitted later. Levo operationalizes this vision by embedding security-led, developer-aligned, and continuous controls directly into the SDLC, transforming compliance from an afterthought into a natural outcome of doing security right.
With Levo, compliance becomes proactive and perpetual. APIs are auto-discovered, data flows mapped, and vulnerabilities tested in real time, ensuring evidence is always audit-ready. From ISO to DPDP and SOC 2 to HIPAA, Levo turns a fragmented compliance landscape into a single control surface, enabling enterprises to deploy once and comply everywhere.
Levo Operationalizing DSCI Recommendations
Operationalizing DSCI Recommendations: The Way Ahead
The challenge isn’t whether enterprises agree with these recommendations, they do, but whether they can operationalize them at scale without increasing manual workload, slowing release cycles, or inflating security budgets.
Levo.ai ensures DSCI compliance doesn’t become another spreadsheet-driven initiative. By automating discovery, documentation, security testing, and sensitive data mapping across pre-production and runtime, Levo lets teams meet DSCI’s foundational requirements in weeks, not quarters.
This frees both development and security teams to focus on higher-order security engineering, adaptive controls, zero-trust enforcement, and proactive threat hunting, without expanding headcount or compromising delivery velocity.
Want to see how your current API posture compares to DSCI recommendations?
Book a Demo through this link!
