Written by Joe Byrne, CTO Advisor, Cisco AppDynamics

As the modern workforce has become distributed across offices and remote locations, so have the applications employees depend on to carry out their work. These distributed applications have drastically changed the security paradigm, drawing out the attack surface area of the digital enterprise. Attackers have been quick to exploit this trend, with research by Red Hat revealing that the majority (93%) of businesses experienced at least one security incident in their Kubernetes environments in the past 12 months.

In the Middle East, governments such as those in the UAE and Saudi Arabia have clearly laid out cloud-first strategies, and subsequently, cloud-native application development is gaining momentum. While this enables organizations to innovate at greater speed and scale, it is also exponentially raising complexity for application and security teams. In a recent Cisco study, ​​92% of global technologists admitted 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.

The UAE’s Head of Cyber Security Mohammed Hamad Al Kuwaiti recently said that the UAE Cyber Security Council cooperates with its partners in deterring over 50,000 cyber-attacks per day. Facing such numbers, it is easy to see how organizations are getting overwhelmed and why a solution must be found.

Application security is essential to the business
The Red Hat study showed that almost a third (31%) of organizations that faced a security incident consequently experienced financial or customer losses. IT teams need to act quickly and decisively in order to protect their customer data and the reputation of their organizations. This means ensuring they have the tools, insights and working practices to bring together applications and security teams to securely develop and deploy modern applications. Crucially, businesses need to apply business context to their security findings so that teams can rapidly locate, assess and prioritize risk, and then remediate issues based on potential business impact.

Applications are now the enabler of business — be it the digital services customers use to interact with organizations, or the enterprise applications employees rely on daily. As a result, brand trust and loyalty are now built upon application availability, security, and performance.

However, with the shift to cloud-native technologies, vulnerabilities can occur anytime and anywhere. This makes it incredibly difficult and time-consuming for application teams and security teams to assess risks and prioritize actions. What they need is clear visibility of each new security risk with real-time vulnerability analytics. But with so many new and constantly changing threats within Kubernetes environments, traditional vulnerability scanning solutions simply don’t provide adequate information.

Business risk observability is now a business imperative
To be as effective as possible, security teams need to be able to evaluate the business risks of potential attacks, align teams and triage threats. To do this, they need to rapidly pinpoint where vulnerabilities exist across application entities — business transactions, services, workload, pods and containers — so that they can quickly isolate them. They then need to assess the severity of these risks, the likelihood that they will be exploited and the risk to the business of each issue.

With ever-increasing numbers of threats, prioritization is key, and this type of business risk observability is essential for technologists to understand and prioritize risks. By combining application performance data and business impact context with vulnerability detection and security intelligence, IT teams can prioritize security issues with a business risk score. This will allow them to easily identify which business transactions present the greatest risk to their organization. For instance, they can assess the risk to sensitive customer data resulting from a particular business transaction, or calculate the potential for loss of revenue.

This approach reframes the cybersecurity threat in a more meaningful context. Instead of firefighting from one issue to the next, as they occur, security teams can act more strategically, based on real-time business transaction data. By prioritizing security issues with business context, they can improve key metrics such as mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to remediation (MTTR).

It is encouraging to see that technologists are recognizing the need for change — 93% state that it’s now important to be able to contextualize security so that they can correlate risk in relation to other key areas such as the application, user and business, and to prioritize vulnerability fixes based on potential impact. Perhaps most importantly, business risk observability helps application and security teams come together around a single source of truth for all application availability, performance and security data. In the era of zero-day threats, where vulnerabilities can remain unknown for long periods of time, such a framework enables all teams to work cross-functionally on secure deployments of modern applications.

Business risk observability provides a platform for IT departments to shift to an integrated DevSecOps approach. Teams are able to collaborate far more effectively and embed security into the application lifecycle from the outset, with development teams adhering to the organization’s most critical security priorities.

The benefits of business risk observability
Gartner predicts that 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms by 2025.  Attackers will undoubtedly be taking note of this, and we can expect that Kubernetes within modern application environments will become an increasingly attractive target. For IT leaders, this represents a significant new threat that they simply haven’t had to consider before. Application security will need to become a major priority for IT departments in all sectors.

There is no abating the flood of applications in the modern enterprise. They have become an essential part of how businesses operate, and in many cases, offer the decisive competitive edge. Recognizing this, organizations must strive to protect their most valuable assets. Business risk observability provides them with an effective means to do so, ensuring applications effectively serve their end purpose of boosting customer loyalty and driving revenues.