Full-stack application and data security with business risk observability

Cisco Full-Stack Observability brings application observability together with security intelligence and risk assessment for comprehensive business-focused oversight

Businesses in all sectors and industries report feeling more exposed to security threats. Recent Cisco AppDynamics research reveals that 89% of technologists say their organization has experienced an expansion in its attack surface over the last two years, and 46% state that this has presented increased challenges.

It’s not surprising. The operational teams tasked with fending off threats and shoring up vulnerabilities to protect their users, customers, technology infrastructure, and data face a threat landscape that has never been more challenging. Today’s applications live in a mix of on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-native environments that makes it complicated to run, integrate, observe, and secure them.

This presents an enticingly large attack surface to bad actors, and results in a vast and continually growing number of external threats for organizations to defend against.

The explosion of digital applications and the resulting torrent of telemetry data they and their dependencies generate have quickly made working existing methods of security monitoring and observability tools extremely challenging.

The volume of data to sort through coupled with the huge number of potential threats has meant disparate tools are bombarding ops teams with alerts, making it difficult to distinguish between alerts that seem urgent and those that are truly important.

Teams become overwhelmed by the noise caused by alert overload. They struggle to collect and correlate data across disparate systems, to determine where the threat or problem lies. That means they lack a complete picture of interdependencies that would accelerate root cause analysis.

Alerts also lack the context that allows teams to understand how any issue impacts user experiences, or the business.

For example, an alert may be marked as high priority if it’s likely to be exploited, but that only matters if exploitation could cause harm to the business. On the other hand, deprioritizing a hard-to-exploit vulnerability can be disastrous if penetration could lead to the leak of personal or critical business data.

When teams cannot accurately tie technology and security issues to business impact, issues that truly pose a significant risk to reputation and revenues may be placed further down the list of priorities than they deserve.

The Cisco AppDynamics report shows IT professionals are aware of the challenge. Ninety-three percent (93%) of them report that it is important to contextualize security and correlate risk as it pertains to applications, and in doing so, understand how to prioritize vulnerability fixes based on potential downstream business impact.

Business Risk Observability: Adding business context to security vulnerabilities

Cisco Full-Stack Observability allows organizations to move beyond traditional perimeter-based controls and towards a proactive, strengthened posture by securing applications based on business risk.

Business risk observability, a Cisco Full-Stack Observability capability, is an industry-first evolution in application security that helps teams prioritize security issues based on potential impact on their business. It combines threat context from multiple world-class Cisco security solutions with application contexts. Providing a stack-ranked, transaction-based business risk score for each individual threat that has been identified, it encompasses threat modeling and a risk-based analysis of an IT environment combined with business-transaction inputs. It also factors in the number of vulnerability instances, their potential severity, and the assets that are threatened.

Teams can understand the likelihood of exploitation and then see the location and impact of threats so they can accelerate response time with real-time remediation guidance including prescriptive actions to prioritize and address the most pressing vulnerabilities.

Data Security Posture Management Observability: Securing sensitive data

With businesses going digital and using more and more applications, data has grown exponentially. So, the need to secure this data is more important than ever. With Data Security Posture Management, teams can identify, classify, prioritize, and mitigate data risks and vulnerabilities along with helping ensure compliance with data protection regulations.

Secure what matters

In essence, Cisco Full-Stack Observability provides powerful and extensible ways to secure applications and data so each team can retain its core competencies while taking unified steps toward less risk and exposure. As a result, organizations can harness their IT architecture in support of core business objectives.