How the right software solutions can help your business observe and secure its applications

• New digital business models generate immense growth opportunities, but also increase risk.
• Businesses need to move beyond traditional application monitoring to full stack observability to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities and ensure optimal performance.
• Providing always-on, secure, and exceptional digital experiences are crucial for maintaining customer trust.

Business tech is becoming more complicated. One survey estimates that by 2025, over 95% of new digital workloads will take place in the cloud — which will lead to millions of opportunities for hackers to break and enter into a business, wreaking havoc along the way. It could also lead to millions of ways for things to go wrong when those workloads interact.

It's a live concern for IT leaders and the C-suite at businesses big and small. But cloud can be secure and reliable, with the help of Cisco's suite of products — and can unlock new opportunities and flexibility.

Total vision, all the time

Full stack observability provides real-time visibility, insights, and actionable optimization across the "full-stack" of a customer's digital experience. That includes visibility, insights, and actions for your data, ensuring that you can keep track of who's accessing your apps and when, and monitor the health of their performance as they interact with others within your business.

Cisco's Full Stack Observability solution brings under one roof visibility and insights that were previously siloed across different teams, for example vulnerabilities and app dependencies — ensuring nothing gets lost in transmission. It can break down the silos that separate teams, correlate data across domains, and help track dependencies and root causes of problems quickly as they arise — as well as catching vulnerabilities before they're exploited.

Vulnerabilities are feared by many organizations: According to an independent survey of 2000 respondents by IDC, 96% of businesses fear negative consequences from a lack of visibility. "You need to make sure that application security is considered at all layers in the stack," said Randy Birdsall, director of product management for Cisco AppDynamics. "You also need to think about it from all portions of the lifecycle — not just writing secure code, but making sure that once it gets into production it remains secure."

Cisco Full Stack Observability solves that. The unified visibility also helps generate insights that might not previously have been found, helping improve performance, prioritize actions, and automate decisions, helping your apps work just right. 

The vulnerabilities that you might not know you have

In business, Common Vulnerability Scoring System scores make the world go round. They're a quick and easy way of identifying and prioritizing the risk of vulnerabilities, so you can take action as needed. The problem is they're far from perfect.

For example, a vulnerability marked only through a CVSS score might be seen as unimportant to a business. But using Cisco's real-time risk score, which analyzes current and historical data on volume and velocity of threats, that threat may score higher based on real-time risks. CVSS scores on their own are "devoid of any context from what's happening in the real world," Birdsall said. 

Cisco's Business Risk Observability score helps businesses triage what's important and what can be pushed to the back burner — important at a time when businesses are stretched, and resources challenged. It looks at all aspects of your business, from the applications you use to the services you access through the cloud, on premises, and in hybrid environments. "We can identify what vulnerabilities your code is relying upon, not just the vulnerabilities that sit on disk," Birdsall said. "What are you actually using? What's going to impact your business? What's going to put you at risk? We're continuously monitoring that. We're also continuing to monitor for threat activity, so if there are bad actors interacting with your code, we're able to pick that up as well and raise the alarm." It allows organizations to work smarter, not harder.

Cisco's Business Risk Observability is an industry leading innovation that brings together a range of metrics and security scores that are natively integrated with Cisco Panoptica for API security, Cisco Talos for threat intelligence, and Cisco Kenna for vulnerability intelligence. Cisco's Business Risk Observability is an enhancement upon and part of Cisco Full Stack Observability.

Assessing risk with Cisco Full Stack Observability

Cisco's Business Risk Observability helps shore up businesses from attacks and challenges. Designed from the ground up to safeguard the security of modern applications, Cisco Full Stack Observability empowers organizations to effectively prioritize their responses based on the potential impact on the business and its users. It provides businesses with a novel, application-based risk-scoring approach that goes beyond pre-existing CVSS metrics to provide additional context and easily actionable insights.

 Being on top of all security risks, and mitigating them when you can, is an important part of any business's survival in the 21st century.

 "If you think about these digital experiences we rely on, there is trust that is extended from the users of those experiences into the applications," Birdsall said. Users hand over personal data, make purchase decisions, and monitor their health using cloud-based apps. "They are extending trust to these businesses. And if that trust is lost through a security incident, everyone suffers." 

Find out more about how Cisco's Full Stack Observability can help you identify vulnerabilities.

This post was created by Insider Studios with Cisco.