This blog was co-written by Vinti Batiste, Vice President, Global Enterprise Segment, Growth Marketing and Stephen Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Global Enterprise Segment, Growth Marketing.

In today's world, more than ever, digital experiences are our way of life. From online shopping, to virtual education, to secure digital healthcare, business is done through applications. And the last year has brought a proliferation of applications that have allowed businesses to expand, redefining the user's digital experience and offering exciting opportunities for many companies.

With the opportunity comes a high degree of complexity. Users expect their digital experiences to be seamless, and that's not easy to accomplish. Apps are the front door to an evolving and expanding digital experience where complexity is on the rise. The foundation that powers these experiences is a complicated mix of devices, applications, branches, data centers, clouds, processes, and people from across an organization. Factors such as the increasingly distributed nature of applications and their interdependence, can cause fragmentation, lack of visibility, extra expenses, and unexpected vulnerabilities.

The answer to this challenge is observability into the full stack of available data from applications to infrastructure and across the entire digital experience. Observability turns visibility into insights and action. Companies need visibility into performance at every step of the user journey to analyze insights better and faster, and to drive the right decisions and actions when they're needed most. As a result, they can discover application and infrastructure interdependencies and make informed resourcing and optimization decisions tied to application demand, relevant policies, and available capacity. Complementary to Cisco's networking automation capabilities, full-stack visibility provides insights and shared context across application and security teams.

Cisco helps organizations deliver optimized application experiences with solutions based upon the foundational principles of full stack observability, cloud-native technology, and end-to-end application security. With Cisco solutions, businesses can promote simplicity, increase IT agility, and rise to new levels of business resiliency. Since applications are at the heart of today's businesses, Cisco's full-stack observability and network automation solutions enable organizations to optimize their resources and environments and create a secure, agile network that can be quickly managed to create the best application experiences for their customers.