Cisco Secure Application brings app and security teams together

Cisco Secure Application, previously known as Security Insights for Cloud Native Application Observability, is now available on the vendor's Full-Stack Observability Platform, launched in June. Secure Application was designed to bring together applications and security teams across an organization to improve security of cloud-native or hybrid applications being built and deployed.

Rushing products out leads to organizations releasing applications without thoroughly considering security. This, in turn, exposes them to vulnerabilities. A Cisco AppDynamics study found that 92% of global technologists believe 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. Cisco believes this is why there has been such an "explosion" of security incidents.

What Cisco Secure Application offers

Expanded visibility and business-risk insights across cloud environments are the main benefits of Cisco Secure Application. It also integrates with other Cisco products, enabling users to locate and highlight and quickly isolate security issues across application entities such as services, workloads, pods, containers, and business transactions.

Other features include a business risk score to help identify and prioritize which business transactions present the greatest risk. This is done by combining application performance data and business impact context from Cisco's Cloud Native Application Observability, with real-time vulnerability detection and security intelligence from Cisco's security products. "An organization's ability to quickly assess risks based on potential business impact, align teams and triage threats is entirely dependent on understanding where vulnerabilities exist, the severity of those risks, the likelihood they will be exploited, and the risk to the business of each issue," Ronak Desai, senior VP and GM for Cisco Full-Stack Observability and AppDynamics, said in a statement.

Secure Application is designed to accelerate response time to security incidents with real-time remediation guidance. It offers prescriptive actions to prioritize and address the most impactful security vulnerabilities, according to Cisco.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform

Launched in June 2023, the Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) Platform brings together data from application, networking, infrastructure, security, cloud, sustainability, and business sources. It does so across the multi-cloud environment and technology stack. The FSO platform's first modules at the time of launch were cloud native application observability, cost insights, application resource optimizer, security insights, and Cisco AIOps.