Businesses are expected to deliver flawless, secure digital experiences to their customers through applications. However, the modern application era has led to an explosion of security risks as distributed applications are built in complex environments that create large attack surfaces - leaving businesses vulnerable to bad actors. Ninety-two percent (92%) of global technologists admit 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. According to RedHat, 93% of companies had a Kubernetes security incident in the last 12 months, and on average, it takes 277 days to identify and contain a data breach.

Application security is foundational to a brand's trust and loyalty, but vulnerabilities can occur anytime, anywhere, making it difficult and time-consuming to prioritize responses. To avoid costly delays that can result in damage to revenue and brand reputation, organizations must have clear visibility of each new vulnerability and the insights to prioritize remediation based on their business impact. According to a survey conducted by Cisco, 93% of IT professionals believe it's important to be able to contextualize security and correlate risk in relation to key areas such as the application, user and business, and in doing so, prioritize vulnerability fixes based on potential business impact.

Prioritize and remediate security issues based on business impact

Business risk observability is an industry-first evolution in application security that prioritizes security issues based on potential impact, allowing teams to rapidly map vulnerabilities and take action where it matters most. By combining the threat context from Cisco security products to understand the likelihood of exploits with the ability to map vulnerabilities and attacks to understand the location and impact of threats, Cisco can uniquely provide organizations with a transaction-based business risk score. This score gives organizations the critical information they need to not only understand where they can reduce their overall organizational risk profile, but also understand when, where, and how to take action to mitigate vulnerabilities that could potentially impact revenue and reputation.

Cisco Secure Application for cloud environments

To help organizations more effectively secure cloud native applications based on business risk, Cisco is introducing Cisco Secure Application on the Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform. Now, teams have access to business risk observability across both hybrid and cloud environments, helping them to rapidly assess risk, prioritize action, and remediate security issues based on potential impact. Cisco Secure Application works seamlessly with Cloud Native Application Observability to deliver this functionality.

With Cisco Secure Application, IT professionals can:

• Locate and highlight security issues across application entities (business transactions, services, workload, pods, containers) so they can be quickly isolated.
• Prioritize issues with a business risk score that combines application and business impact context with vulnerability detection and security intelligence from Cisco security products to easily identify which business transactions have the greatest risk.
• Accelerate response times with real-time remediation guidance with recommended prescriptive actions to prioritize and address the most impactful vulnerabilities.

Protect what matters with Cisco Secure Application

Cisco Secure Application helps organizations bring applications and security teams together to secure development and deployments of modern applications. Teams have expanded visibility and intelligent insights into business risks to better prioritize and respond in real-time to potential revenue-impacting security events and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.

• Take a deeper dive into observing business risk in cloud native environments
• Learn more about Cisco Secure Application
• Learn more about Cisco FSO
• Learn more about Cisco Observability Platform