Welcome to the October edition of the What’s New in Security series — and — happy security awareness month!
When it comes to protecting cloud environments, the ability to focus on security risks that affect the areas you care about most is paramount. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done in a world of data overload where there’s not enough hours in a day to accurately and continuously aggregate every information feed. Business risk observability for cloud environments enables you to not only parse through the noise, but quickly single out and prioritize actions that can ultimately improve your overall security risk posture.
The newly available cloud security functionalities of Cisco Secure Application focus on pinpointing security issues and delivering a prioritized list based on business impact. With this information, your teams can accelerate remediation to protect what matters most.
Locate security issues within cloud native applications
Finding the most critical vulnerabilities in increasingly complex applications is half the battle. Cisco Secure Application looks across business transactions, services, pods and containers to highlight and correlate security issues, so you can act quickly and reduce meantime to remediation.
Understanding the full breadth and depth of a vulnerability involves going beyond just the individual line of code it affects — to consider the application, infrastructure and business context associated with the vulnerability. With Cisco Secure Application, you can easily gain a comprehensive overview of your application security issues, or dive right into the granular details of where and how a vulnerability impacts critical areas of your application.
Fig. 1 shows a business transaction overview with the associated business risk score.
Prioritize action with dynamic business risk scoring
Long lists of vulnerabilities to tackle can be daunting, especially in a constantly evolving security landscape where today’s top priority might not be the same as tomorrow’s. So how can we keep up with the latest intelligence at all times? The key is automation.
Staying ahead means having the ability to instantly prioritize security issues based on automated risk scoring that combines application context, business impact and the latest security intelligence. Cisco Secure Application delivers comprehensive risk scoring that allows you to understand the full picture without manually piecing it together yourself.
Fig. 2 illustrates a prioritized list of vulnerabilities based on risk.
Accelerate response with prescriptive remediation guidance
In today’s fast paced complex environments, organizations can’t risk the loss of time it takes to manually figure out where to focus for the best interest of the business. Cisco Secure Application for cloud environments enables teams to have an always-on view of the top three remediation priorities. And by focusing there, teams can accelerate security issue mitigation based on real-time remediation guidance to quickly protect what matters most — while reducing overall security risk as efficiently as possible.
Fig. 3 shows business risk scores extrapolated by business transactions and remediation guidance.
For more information watch our latest webinar, Leverage business risk observability for cloud environments to protect what matters most and take a deeper dive into our new security capabilities here: Protect cloud native application environments faster — based on business risk with Cisco Secure Application.
Audrey Nahrvar is a product marketing manager with a background in application security and ethical hacking. Audrey held positions at Autodesk and Shutterfly before joining AppDynamics in 2017 as a security engineer first and then promoted to security architect. In her off hours, Audrey enjoys spending time with her husky, in the mountains.
