Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco AppDynamics explains how their latest offering Cisco Secure Application enables organisations in the region to protect their apps in real time and automatically block threats.
Can you explain what cloud native applications are and their significance in modern business environments?
Cloud native applications are applications architected to take advantage of cloud capabilities to minimize the complexity in application development and maintenance and enabling rapid releases with dynamic scalability.
Today, applications are the front door for virtually every business and companies, no matter their sizes, are under pressure to accelerate digital transformation projects, shift to modern, distributed applications and deliver world-class digital experiences for their customers and employees.
In this application-driven market, organizations are more vulnerable than ever and exposed to security threats, facing larger attack surfaces and gaps in their application security layer. Therefore, application security has become a critical priority for businesses and this latest release provides customers with the tools they need to deliver unmatched and secure digital experiences across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
What are the common security risks associated with cloud native applications?
The shift to modern, distributed applications has led to a dramatic increase in attack and organizations found themselves more vulnerable to revenue and reputation-impacting security risks. According to Red Hat, 93% of businesses have experienced at least one security incident in their Kubernetes environments in the past 12 months and 31% have experienced financial or customer loss as a result.
Although the growing adoption of cloud native application development is allowing organizations to innovate at greater speeds and instill agility into their operations, it is also exponentially raising complexity for application and security teams. In fact, recent Cisco showed that 100% of UAE technologists admitted that the rush to rapidly innovate and respond to the changing needs of customers has come at the expense of robust application security during software development.
To avoid costly delays, protect their customer data and reputation, organizations must give their IT teams the right tools, insights and working practices to bring together applications and security teams to securely develop and deploy modern applications. And crucially, organizations need to apply business context to their security findings so that teams can rapidly locate, assess and prioritize risk, and then remediate issues based on potential business impact.
How does Cisco Secure Application work and how different is it from Security Insights for Cloud Native Application Observability?
Cisco Secure Application (previously Security Insights for Cloud Native Application Observability), provides organizations with expanded visibility and intelligent business risk insights to help them better prioritize issues, respond in real-time to revenue-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.
Specifically, the latest release helps customers to securely manage cloud native applications in addition to hybrid applications, bring together application and security teams to securely develop and deploy modern applications, and connects business context with security findings, tying together application performance data with security intelligence from Cisco’s industry-leading security products.
How does the Secure Application identify security issues across the entire IT estate and application entities?
Built on the Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform, Cisco Secure Application works in conjunction with Cloud Native Application Observability from Cisco. It helps organizations effectively secure cloud native applications, based on real-time vulnerability analytics and business risk observability.
By uniquely adding business context to security findings, Cisco helps IT teams gain intelligent business risk insights to better prioritize issues, respond in real-time to revenue-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.
How does it enable customers with greater visibility and business risk insights across hybrid and cloud environments?
To help organizations secure cloud native applications, the new Cisco Secure Application offering, now available on Cisco’s recently launched Full-Stack Observability Platform, arms customers with expanded visibility and intelligent business risk insights across cloud environments, empowering businesses to better prioritize and respond in real-time to revenue and reputation-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.
Integrated with Cisco’s industry leading security products it enables customers to locate and highlight security issues across application entities (including services, workloads, pods, containers and business transactions) and isolate them at speed. It also helps prioritizing issues with a business risk score that combines application performance data and business impact context from Cisco’s own Cloud Native Application Observability, with real-time vulnerability detection and security intelligence from Cisco’s security products, to identify which business transactions present the greatest risk.
And finally, it accelerate response time to security incidents with real-time remediation guidance, complete with prescriptive actions to prioritize and address the most impactful security vulnerabilities.