Cisco introduces full-stack observability enhancement: Business Risk Observability

The rising cost of global cybercrime is expected to drive a nearly $200 billion spend on data security and risk management products this year¹. Not a huge surprise considering how complexity across remote work configurations and cloud-based application delivery models can promote risk. With heightened public awareness around data privacy and protection that occurs with every breach, applications remain a top security concern as companies seek to balance operational resilience and driving revenue with cultivating user trust across high-performing applications.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability’s application security solution

Cisco Full-Stack Observability enables teams to leverage contextual telemetry data to drive correlated insights across the entire IT estate. As such, performance impact and experience tracing can be seen in real-time through the lens of network issues and security vulnerabilities. Application security, a foundational Cisco Full-Stack Observability use case, provides the ability to simplify the lifecycle of vulnerability fixes and security incidents by creating shared context across application and security teams.

Business Risk Observability is an industry-first evolution in the application security capabilities of Cisco Full-Stack Observability. It helps organizations become more resilient against the growing attack surface of the Experience Economy. Using Kenna’s vulnerability scoring and Cisco AppDynamics business transactions context, Business Risk Observability allows teams to generate an application-based business risk score to help mitigate vulnerabilities on applications or services that have a high likelihood of exploitation. It is available now through Cisco Secure Application, which is integrated into Cisco AppDynamics.

Cisco Secure Application enhancements: A game changing view

Speed and coordination are paramount when confronting application security risks. Bad actors are standing by, waiting to take advantage of siloed security and application teams, resulting in multi-million dollar consequences. Unfortunately, traditional vulnerability and threat scanning solutions lack the shared business context required for rapid assessment and priority alignment that organizations need to align teams and triage.

To mitigate this gap, teams need to know the source of vulnerabilities and threats, how likely a risk is to be exploited and the bottom line impact each issue represents — before a breach occurs. Available on the Cisco AppDynamics SaaS platform, these new features of Cisco Secure Application work together in solving those challenges:

I’m excited to attend Cisco Live 2023 Amsterdam, where we announced three top-tier capabilities added to Cisco Secure Application. These additions enable DevSecOps teams to detect vulnerabilities and threats in real time and assess potential impact on business-critical applications.

Attack mapping to business transactions: Attack mapping to business transactions to quickly understand the source and impact of threats so teams can locate where and when an attack may occur within common application workflows such as login, checkout or payment.

Security threat visibility: Threat intelligence from Talos, Kenna Risk Meter score distribution and Panoptica for API security provide insight from multiple telemetry sources into the severity of security threats detected within applications.

Business risk scoring: These capabilities help prioritize threat remediation based on automated security risk scoring. It combines risk scores from multiple threat feeds and application contexts to provide a stack-ranked business risk score for each threat so teams can see the most pressing risks, avoid delays and accelerate collaboration across responses.

Protect what matters: Reduce risk profiles for better application security

The noise associated with constantly evolving threats and vulnerabilities can stifle growth and innovation, particularly for teams with limited resources. The new security intelligence features in Cisco Secure Application enable teams to stay on top by leveraging application and business transaction data. Together these additional capabilities help prioritize responses based on impact and likelihood of exposure. By gaining quick understanding of how risks and vulnerabilities impact their applications, teams can minimize guesswork, increase user trust and better protect the bottom line.

We are thrilled to offer correlated business context, risk profile reduction and automatic prioritization of vulnerabilities to help organizations build more resiliency into the application security posture.

Learn more about Ronak Desai, Cisco SVP & GM, AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability (FSO), and gain insights on business and tech challenges that make full-stack observability imperative, in this Q&A: Cutting complexity for an app-fueled world.

1. Cybersecurity dive. Cybersecurity spending on pace to reach $260B by 2026. Oct. 18, 2022