Announcing the Nightfall Developer Platform – APIs for Building Data Protection into Any Application

Nightfall’s vision is to power data protection in every app or service. Our native SaaS integrations for apps like Slack, GitHub, and Google Drive already protect organizations, ranging from small startups to the Fortune 100, against data leaks with our machine learning-powered detection engine. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Nightfall Developer Platform, so you can build data discovery, classification, and protection using our powerful APIs. This launch underscores our commitment to empowering developers with accurate, easy to use data protection infrastructure. With the Developer Platform, you now have access to the same high-accuracy, battle-tested detectors that power our native integrations.

How does the Nightfall Developer Platform work?

The Nightfall Developer Platform exposes standard HTTP APIs that give you access to Nightfall’s detection engine. These are the same building blocks used to power our native cloud security integrations to secure data in Slack, Google Drive, GitHub and many other applications. 

Use our APIs to scan text payloads or files, spanning business files (PDF, Office), images (JPG, PNG), archives (ZIP), and many other file types – including machine learning based OCR for text extraction in images. Nightfall’s broad set of high-accuracy detectors include PII, PHI, PCI, credentials & secrets – spanning a variety of industries, compliance regimes, and geographies.

At a high level, Nightfall’s text and file scanning APIs accept a set of detection rules and return a list of findings triggered by the detection rules supplied in the request. Each finding object includes the likelihood of the match, the location of the finding in the string or file, surrounding context, and more. Nightfall also provides multiple methods for de-identifying or redacting sensitive data.

Watch the video below for a brief look at how the platform works in action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxrY8Sw3QRU

How can I leverage the Nightfall Developer Platform?

Given the growing amount of data compliance legislation around the world and the rising costs of data breaches, it’s important for organizations to know where their data is and be able to swiftly remove it from where it doesn’t belong. By solving the problem of content inspection and sensitive data classification, Nightfall frees developers to focus on building applications that are secure and reduces the chances of expensive data leaks. Using our new APIs, you can build data protection into any application or service. Here are a few common use cases to spur your imagination:

• Sanitize user input to prevent unnecessary collection or proliferation of sensitive customer data. For example, warn and prevent customers from unknowingly submitting PII or other sensitive information in form fields or file uploads. Automatically redact or encrypt sensitive data that’s ingested.
• Audit and remove sensitive data in data silos and processing workflows for compliance. Identify when and where specific types of sensitive content appear within different components of your infrastructure, such as logging (e.g. Datadog) or data warehouses (e.g. Snowflake), so that you can take immediate action.
• Build data classification and DLP features directly into your SaaS application. Deliver functionality that enterprises are increasingly starting to expect, while reducing time to market and maintenance overhead.

These are just a few ways to use the Nightfall Developer Platform. Learn more about potential use cases here. We can’t wait to see what you build.

How can I get started with the Nightfall Developer Platform?

Getting started is free and easy - sign up for a Nightfall account and create an API key. Once you have your API key, follow the Quickstart guide in our newly launched documentation portal to make your first API request.

To help you get off the ground quickly, we’ve released SDKs for popular programming languages including Python, Node.js, Golang, Java and more on the way. Check out the Nightfall Playground to test detection rules, generate sample data, and see a collection of tools built on our public APIs.